US Negotiators Cave On Internet Provisions To ACTA 80
Hugh Pickens writes "Ars Technica reports that with the release of the 'near-final' ACTA text (PDF), it is becoming clear that the US has caved on the most egregious provisions from earlier drafts (advocating 'three strikes' regimes, ordering ISPs to develop anti-piracy plans, promoting tough DRM anticircumvention language, setting up a 'takedown' notification system, ordering 'secondary liability' for device makers) and has largely failed in its attempts to push the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) onto the rest of the world. Apparently, a face-saving agreement is better than no agreement at all — but even the neutered ACTA could run into problems, with Mexico's Senate recently approving a nonbinding resolution asking for the country to suspend participation in ACTA, while key members of the European Parliament have also expressed skepticism about the deal."
software patent liability for ISPs? (Score:5, Interesting)
For software patents, the key thing to check is if ISPs will have liability for not removing stuff that a patent holder claims violates his patents. If that's still there, then we'll get DMCA take-down notices for software patents. More on the problem here:
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/ACTA_and_software_patents [swpat.org]
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement_overview [swpat.org]
Doesn't look too bad - right? (Score:3, Interesting)
First line of page 8. The general worry would be that patent holders would gain the power to, by sending a letter, turn ISPs or other parts of the distribution chain from innocent bystanders into entities that are "knowingly" taking part in the infringement. But, this text doesn't look too worrying - anyone agree/disagree?
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IANAL but doesn't that basically says that if you're an ISP and you let, for example torrent activity happen on your netwok, then you can also be held responsible and made to cough up some dough? Most
infringing activity of intellectual property rights
happens through torrent these days, right?
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It depends. In the EU, ISPs are protected by "mere conduit" status which says they're not responsible for everything that flows through their wires. I have a vague recollection that there is similar in the USA's DMCA. So ISPs aren't engaged in any infringing activity, so this part of ACTA doesn't apply to them.
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What other parts need scrutiny?
The entire godawful document, cover to cover.
What we really need is someone to keep up with the most recent proposals and break everything down from legalese into talking points more understandable to the layman. That's how we'll get people to care about it.
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{US: For the purpose of this Agreement, Parties agree that patents do not fall within the scope of this Section.}
Patents was one of the sticking points, the US rep wanted to keep patents out but the Mexicans wanted patents in.
I say all of it needs to be revealed to everyone. Of course it won't be because they people would oppose it. Notice how the second article says it's an "executive agreement" instead of a "treaty." [techdirt.com] An agreement doesn't need senate approval.
Falcon
Re:This is no surprise. (Score:4, Informative)
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Good news, as far as I'm concerned. Wouldn't it be ironic if other, more sane countries started exerting international pressure on the US to get rid of some of our more draconian copyright and patent regulations? That'd be a hoot.
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The US was the one pushing all those things (and Japan)Them caving means they agreed to remove all those silly provisions due to pressure from other countries (EU, Canada, Mexico, etc.)
Other way 'round (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, this looks like a (partial) victory for the people.
The fix it! (Score:2, Interesting)
If you think the system is broken, then join the people working to fundamentally change it at the core. [metagovernment.org]
It is either that, or continue to complain but have absolutely no effect whatsoever. Which is preferable?
MPAA news (Score:2)
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I will disagree. One of the two speaks in complete sentences. :P
Only when assisted by teleprompter... the rest of the time he's got more "err umm ahh" than Diamond Joe Quimby.
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Aww, how cute, he thought the government were fighting for his rights and then gave in!
Quite the opposite dear fellow, they were trying to shaft you with an even bigger rod and haven't managed to get their way 100%. Yet.
big companies just dont to pay for Health Care now (Score:3, Interesting)
big companies just don't to pay for Health Care now but in 2014 then people will have more choice.
But how can the big McDonalds have so much over head in there min med plan? and THE Republican ARE THE ONES who WANT TO KILL THE Health Care bill so ANY THING CAN BE A pre existing conditions so if you get sick and run up a big bill they have a way out. SELL OVER STATE LINE will just lead to ONE STATE being the only place to get Health Care and it will be the one that lets them have lowers forced stuff they mu
LOL, they'll be back! (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry, guys, those provisions will be back soon enough in some other "agreement"!
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Yup, and it'll probably be in a treaty about fisheries. Or corn subsidies.
still need to kill it (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't have secret treaties become law in democratic countries. It would be the end of democracy as we know it.
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Re:still need to kill it (Score:4, Insightful)
So the citizens don't have a chance to say they don't agree with the law until things they are already doing become illegal?
Basically it's eroding any actual "fair use" that anybody ever had, and making it so that you more or less need the permission of media companies to use the internet or own a computer. If they don't like you, they'll take it away from you.
People don't actually want the provisions in this awful treaty, and it makes no sense whatsoever for every government in the world to be clerks for copyright holders. This really does subjugate personal/government interests to those of corporations.
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And prisons. Which are mostly now corporations.
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The same reasons that the text of Bills in Congress is often kept closely guarded for months or years until the Bill is formally introduced:
1) Politicians don't want to tout a bill that lowers taxes and saves puppies only to have the puppy provision removed before the Bill reaches a committee. At least if the committee removes it he has someone else to blame.
2) Politicians also don't want to deal with the blowback for unpopular pieces of a bill until they know it actually has to be in there.
This thing is t
Democracy is already dead. (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, it was never alive. Representative Republics are not Democracies. Frankly, Democracy should scare the hell out of you. Do you want the people watching Jersey Shore directly enforcing their will upon you?
The picking of nits aside... I'm starting to believe the loonies who buy tons of desolate land and huddle in their basements while armed with enough firepower to end any zombie uprising aren't so crazy. Yes, yes, so it's not the UN attempting to eliminate our sovereignty; it's something far, f
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It's only the US which has this peculiar "republic not a democracy" interpretaton. In the rest of the world, we've long been using the word "democracy" to mean any political system where people vote in free and fair elections, clarifying it as needed - i.e. US is a representative democracy, Greek city-states were direct democracies, etc.
Re:still need to kill it (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Arms_Limitation_Talks [wikipedia.org]
Those were held in secret. We *knew* they were going on. But until they big flourish of signing the things we didnt really know what was in them.
Secrecy has its place (such as in the salt talks exactly what you were working on and how much of everything you had). But in the case of copyright negotiations? Come on...
Also correct me if I am wrong here but wasnt the DMCA because of a treaty? Yet suddenly all the other countries do not want it. So why exactly did we in the US get stuck with harsher rules? These are questions we should be asking our senators and congressmen.
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I don't have the time to research it, but as a guess, I'd say you answered your own question without realizing it. The rules ended up so harsh here because of pressure from the likes of the RIAA and other media organizations to make them that way, then got signed into law. After years and years of 'field testing' the D
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what leader/governing body (outside the US anyway) wants to be known for ratifying such a treaty now?
The French brought HADOPI into force, I could see them supporting ACTA.
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The French brought HADOPI into force, I could see them supporting ACTA.
Ooh, and that is going really well round there, isnt it :)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/08/0051245/French-ISP-Refuses-To-Send-Out-Infringement-Notices
/me thinks the world is somehow becoming a wee bit more sane :D
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I think the difference is that most treaties affect the signing countries at a government level, whereas ACTA affects the signatories at an individual level; i.e. there are provisions in that treaty which will require many hundreds of thousands of individuals to change their behavior or face punishment. Yes, Arms Limitation obviously affects all the individuals in a country, but it doesn't take cooperation on an individual or corporate level to follow the treaty, nor is there punishment on an individual or
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Democracy has been getting ass raped by corporations and lobbyists for years.
Governments are more than willing to trash democratic principles and legal freedoms in the name of "national security" and "fighting terrorism" bogeymen. They have secret negotiations where they won't tell us what happened, but expect us to live with the outcome.
At any given time, mankind is only a few months away from
Re:still need to kill it (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, we really have to teach people what "res publica" means.
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The US isn't a democratic nation, it's a plutocratic republic.
Re:still need to kill it (Score:5, Insightful)
demacracy is failling, that's why.
as the wealth gap between the poorest and the richer becomes wider, the developed nations are moving towards a form of corporate feudalism, where the general population becomes serfs of large conglomerates, subject to their rules, whose objective is to syphon money and power to themselfs, leaving to the people barelly enough to stay alive an feeding the corporate lords.
it's not paranoia or a conspiracy theory, is just how i see it, so feel free to disagree.
my rationale id that big money doesn't like democracy, they like money and power. mostly because power allows them to earn even more money, and both can become an adiction. a well organized democracy, with enlightened voters can be an obstacle to large corporations to earn more money and power, so they try to corrupt it. the result tends to a kind of feudalism.
to avoid this, it takes an educated people to vote for high taxation for large corporations and wealthy citizens. leave them enough to re-invest and create jobs, but not enough to corrupt the sytem. but i don't see this happing anytime soon anywhere in the world.
Here's an idea (Score:2, Insightful)
If everyone just ignored the "products" of these big media firms then none of the copyright legislation would have come into existence.
But people want their bread and circuses. Therefore *you* are to blame, not malevolent lobbyists and corrupted politicians.
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There is some truth to this, but it has its limits. Many people HAVE revolted against the big media companies, most stop buying their products, some resorting to internet piracy, some moving to radio (recording/listening). Their response however has been to simply attributed ALL of their losses to internet piracy (oh and embellished those losses beyond all reason), claiming that's why they needed new, invasive measures. Overall I highly doubt that this is over, the ACTA still contains many unpleasant mea
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If everyone just ignored the "products" of these big media firms then none of the copyright legislation would have come into existence.
Have you seen the music industry sales figures? Ignoring the products is what brought on the copyright legislation. And the lawsuits.
The less we buy, the more they cry. It can't POSSIBLY be their fault.
Still despicable and unacceptable (Score:5, Insightful)
The DMCA stuff was merely the tip of the iceberg. There's still a lot wrong with this document -- like, making just linking to illegal content illegal, the conflation of counterfeiting (trademark law) with copyrights, internet "copyrights" and patents, the way infringement penalties are calculates (as lost sales), border controls on medicines and other products in transit, and let's not forget the despicable way in which the entire thing was written in total secrecy without input from the public (the stakeholders).
I personally refuse to allow ACTA to pass into law (i.e., member countries' laws will need to change, despite earlier claims to the opposite), because not only does it bring even more draconian enforcement of intellectual monopolies (which I disagree with at a philosophical level), but because it sets a terrible precedent that gives politicians and lobbyists even more freedom to take away our freedoms.
Heh, why bother with ACTA when.. (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/09/30/democrats_shelve_net_neutrality_plan/
Democrats shelve net neutrality plans: the internet is going to be a very slanted service if Net neutrality legislation doesn't go through..
You won't need ACTA to regulate things.
Follow us to Mordor... (Score:4, Informative)
Lord of the Rings online has DOUBLED its revenue since becoming free to play online. You can then pay a-la-carte for upgrades, etc. but you can still play for free if you like.
An interesting business model that may be the the one model to rule them all...
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/07/lord-of-the-rings-online-doubles-revenue-since-going-free-to-pla/ [joystiq.com]
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free play (Score:3, Interesting)
Aside from all the talk of Intellectual Property rights laws and protectionism, the video game company Turbine and the band Radiohead have a successful 'pay what you want' model that is profitable.
The Grateful Dead [wikipedia.org], who John Perry Barlow [wikipedia.org] one of the founders of EFF was a lyricist for, allowed concert goers to record their music.
Falcon
Kill it (Score:5, Insightful)
As a "non-treaty treaty" negotiated in secret without any attempt at public accountability or a public vote of adoption, ACTA represents an abuse of process and should be opposed even if all it did was support Motherhood and Apple Pie.
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As a "non-treaty treaty" negotiated in secret without any attempt at public accountability or a public vote of adoption, ACTA represents an abuse of process and should be opposed even if all it did was support Motherhood and Apple Pie.
At first I read that as "Motörhead and Apple Pie" and was thinking that sounded like a pretty awesome treaty.
What. (Score:3, Insightful)
The submitter is talking about takedown provisions as "egregious." Considering the alternative to a takedown notice is just opening up with a lawsuit, I'm not sure what about it is so evilly anti-consumer.
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You missed the other alternative: artists and publishers are forced to allow pirates to screw them and their paying customers over. All else is evil by comparison.
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Considering the alternative to a takedown notice is just opening up with a lawsuit, I'm not sure what about it is so evilly anti-consumer.
If your ISP is served a take-down notice because of what you uploaded, you have to prove you have the right to do so. If however a lawsuit is required they have to prove you're guilty. Personally I prefer innocent until proven guilty.
Falcon
Senseless agreements (Score:2)
Unfortunately, i suspect that they specifically made it completely crazy so they could "cave" on a few horrible points and get the rest of the senseless agreement through.
Don't stop writing your congresscritters, MEPs or whoever else will (pretend to) listen!
Injecting some common sense into the proceedings (Score:2)
Regardless of what caused this backtracking, with the economy in the toilet, deterioration conditions in Afghanistan and a few other really urgent considerations like the upcoming mid-term elections, could the Obama administration have decided to pick battles to fight that will actually matter?
wax off, wane on (Score:1)
Didn't take out the most egregious part (Score:2)
They took out some parts related to fighting piracy (e.g. disconnecting pirates) but left the parts that are the least related to piracy and has the greatest impact on non-pirate-related uses:
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http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/363561/updated_internet_industry_australia_backs_new_acta_draft/ [computerworld.com.au]
As you noted, we are going to get the very worst part of DMCA.
No more consumer protections from the next gen dvd region codes ect.
Be fun to see what Australia tries for a "adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies" effort, could an ISP level filter help?
Here's a common tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
Pitch something completely ridiculous and unacceptable instead of what you actually want. Tone it down gradually. Congratulations, now your awful idea is a compromise and a relief rather than an outrage.
Which US representative will sign this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will someone please tell me which of our elected US representatives plan to sign this? I want to know so that I will never vote for them and so that I can encourage all my friends and family to never vote for them.
Stupid question :) (Score:2, Insightful)
New laws are very rarely, if any, removed once implemented. There is no way back after they did this to us. I am wondering if we are still allowed to watch DVD on Linux O.o since it is forbidden to circumvent protection technologies.
New laws (Score:2)
are very rarely, if any, removed once implemented.
That brings up one of the few things I liked in the Republicans' Pledge to America [gop.gov]. It included this: "We will adhere to the Constitution and require every bill to cite its specific Constitutional Authority". I thought it also included a sunset clause for new laws, new laws would only be for a certain amount of tyme before they expired or were approved again, but I didn't find it this tyme.
Falcon
Worthless (Score:2)
The ACTA, like all other anti-piracy bills/treaties, is completely worthless. What will this do? Take away rights from the average citizens while pirates, as usual, find ways around these 'protective measures'. Going after people who don't hurt anyone to begin with and taking away rights from everyone is simply idiotic. Too bad the general public barely knows how to work a television remote, or perhaps they'd see the idiocy in this and do something about it.
Action legal, but not the tools (Score:2)
That right there is the reason why we have to fight it. If they say "it's legal to circumvent DRM, but not to distribute tools to do it," then we'll have no ability to do so. We
Acta be gone (Score:1)