U.S. Plans to Kill Pirate Bay, Monitor ISPs With Multinational ACTA Proposal

[Joanne98]

by Code Breaker
Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 09:07:32 PM PDT
The long running saga of litigation against The Pirate Bay has been well publicized and discussed depth at DailyTech. The Pirate Bay was slapped with conspiracy charges by the government of Sweden early this year, at the urging of the IFPI, the parent organization of the RIAA. Under attack by IFPI lawyers and Swedish authorities, the sardonic pirate bay chaps told the IFPI lawyers to "screw themselves" and countersued for compensation for lost traffic.

Now Wikileaks has obtained a leaked copy of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a shadowy bill that has been being discussed in Congress behind closed doors. The new multi-lateral intellectual property measure is being pushed by Republican U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab, who designed much of it. The ACTA bill is apparently supported by the U.S., the European Commission (well known for its recent fining of Microsoft), Japan, and Switzerland.

daily tech

Code Breaker's diary :: ::
The part I find amusing...

Do they really expect to arrest entire nations? Look around you, anyone else in the room with you? Have they downloaded music? How about movies? Video games? Ask them, they won't hesitate to tell you.

Chances are the majority of the people you know, are criminals. (Unless you're perhaps Amish.)

If the government were to catch every person downloading copyrighted material, and lock them away... the only people left would be infant children and the elderly retired and dying.

What does the government seriously hope to achieve here?
What CAN they achieve?

They can't scare internet users into obeying the law. They simply can't catch enough people to really cause anyone to notice them being caught.

They can't stop you from getting at those files... you would literally have to trash the entire internet to stop the file sharing (which would also be trashing all other forms of electronic communication, they're one and the same.)

This of course, is not new. (History repeats itself and all that.)

Cassettes.
Ah yes, those plastic things you used to have to spend half an hour re-feeding the tape back into because the cassette player just chewed it up.

What was so wonderful about cassettes? Both audio and video?
Piracy.

Thats right, blank tapes were so common in stores everywhere, because people were pirating songs and movies.
... what, you didn't think there were actually 100 home movies a day being made from the tapes sold at one wal-mart do you?
The practice of copying music, and copying movies became so common, cassette players were being sold with two cassette bays so you could clone cassettes.
More notably, it became such a common occurrence that the government had no option but to cave in and let it happen.

Of course, out of kindness (and a desire not to get sued) the tape manufacturers paid the record companies a certain toll. Lets face it, you're not going to pay for it... but you are paying for the tapes.

Essentially in comparison... the tapes are now your hard drive. The radio and cable TV is now the internet.

And they're trying to sue the DJ.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/13/0732/24934

IMHO.. The treaty needs to be stopped anyway. Bush is going around the Congress using FTA's. This is a long-term trend. Stop it now before it gets going.