Copyright treaty aims to kill online filesharing

[Remington]

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

    * * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

    * * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

    * * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

    * * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

None of this strikes me as being even remotely legal. Will it fly? Will the internets be killed by Grayface? Who the hell knows anymore?
STAY TUNED.

More links:
http://torrentfreak.com/secret-anti-piracy-treaty-turns-isps-into-pirates-091104/
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4510/125/
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/leaked-acta-internet-provisions-three-strikes-and-

[Faust]

That sounds brilliant! You mean I would be able to lodge thousands of complaints of copyright violation a day against any company or person who annoys me and without trial or supporting evidence they will have to go through the rigmarole of trying to get it sorted out before their ISP blocks them?
This sounds like the most fun law ever.

[Remington]

That sounds brilliant! You mean I would be able to lodge thousands of complaints of copyright violation a day against any company or person who annoys me and without trial or supporting evidence they will have to go through the rigmarole of trying to get it sorted out before their ISP blocks them?
This sounds like the most fun law ever.

Nah, it won't be quite that awesome. You see, they won't have the option of sorting it out: the ISPs have to banzor them as soon as the unsupported claim is made. If they don't, the ISPs themselves are considered pirates. Awesome, eh?

[Cramulus]

to faust
unmittens to the treaty

everybody might as well piss in the pool before it gets closed and we have to move onto internet^#2

[The Good Reverend Roger]

That sounds brilliant! You mean I would be able to lodge thousands of complaints of copyright violation a day against any company or person who annoys me and without trial or supporting evidence they will have to go through the rigmarole of trying to get it sorted out before their ISP blocks them?
This sounds like the most fun law ever.

It sounds like the end of Doctor Strangelove, just waiting to happen.   

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

That sounds brilliant! You mean I would be able to lodge thousands of complaints of copyright violation a day against any company or person who annoys me and without trial or supporting evidence they will have to go through the rigmarole of trying to get it sorted out before their ISP blocks them?
This sounds like the most fun law ever.

It sounds like the end of Doctor Strangelove, just waiting to happen.   

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Cellmate?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

We should start a campaign to complain against everybody and get everybody's internet blocked.

[Remington]

We should start a campaign to complain against everybody and get everybody's internet blocked.

Starting with everyone who votes/has voted for this?

I like it.

[Bruno]

So...to save the internet, we have to burn it down?

[That One Guy]

Easy solution to get this repealed if it actually goes into effect - accuse all .gov ISPs of copyright infringement. Better than DoS attacks! Hell, the last bullet point (archiving material, disability access, etc.) is essentially the Library of Congress, HUD, HHS, etc. main reason for existing, so they'll be able to be used to shut down all of it.

Gotta love all this 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

We should start a campaign to complain against everybody and get everybody's internet blocked.

What I said.  Dr Strangelove ending, nukes everywhere, no survivors.

INTERNETS ORVER.

[LMNO]

Dibs on the Slim Pickins role.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Dibs on the Slim Pickins role.

FUCK! 

TGRR,
Behind the 8 ball, as usual.

[Cramulus]

I have faith in the creativity of internet users. Enforcing that all content on the internet is policed somehow will take an army of people. An ARMY. In the end, the good data will be hidden by encyrption and darknets. People will flock from the commercial web onto the less regulated sites. The internet is, in some ways, a form of communication. I would bet good money that the government simply cannot regulate that any more than they can stop me from recording songs I hear on the radio and selling the tapes on the street.


The illusion of control, however, can be very effective.

[Captain Utopia]

Holywood has been creating computer generated actors for a good few years now, increasingly lifelike too. Then you have something like Poser, with its ability to generate lifelike people for under $500. So I wonder what the state of open-source rendering/blender will look like in 10 years. Because pretty darn soon, we're going to have the ability to easily create our own tv shows and movies with lifelike actors, and it'll cost peanuts to make. This will inevitably make the youtube of today look like a goddamn shining beacon of cultural beauty.

But there will be groups of people who will take the time to script and direct. Some of these people will start creating content which outshines that offered commercially. If they offer it for free, with or without advertising, it needn't even be better than commercial content.

An analogy might be with the current state of the newspaper industry - they set up paywalls, and people started finding out that they can get a different take on the same news from another source or blog. This in turn built up the blog infrastructure to the point where everybody is slowly cluing in to the fact that paper news is in rapid decline. So we'll support musicians who don't pay into their protection racket, and we'll support free content producers while the copyright holders rot slowly away. Celebrity culture is in its burnout phase. A generation from now will look back on us with the same bemusement as we do on Beatlemania.

But my point is - fuck them and their stupid copyright laws. They're fucked already. The revolution has already started and it'll be the lowliest of monkeys tearing them down and nibbling on their bones.