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Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal)
Glyn Moody looks at the "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) in a Linux Journal article. This essentially secret (in the US, for "national security" reasons) treaty looks to implement a wide array of restrictions that the content "producers" are lobbying for. As one might guess, it is a vast expansion of copyright. "The second of these means that ISPs would become liable for copyright infringement committed by their users. The idea here is to force them to become copyright cops if they want to survive, and to shift the onus onto them for the policing of all digital content – a massive win for the media industries, which have hitherto shown themselves totally inept when it comes to trying to do the same."
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Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 17:48 UTC (Mon) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]
Anyone have any plans? I just wrote the White House expressing my distaste, and reminding Obama that I voted for him on transparency.
I there's anything I'm sick of in this lifetime, it's political sleight-of-hand.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 20:20 UTC (Mon) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
"reminding Obama that I voted for him on transparency"
Man, are you naive!
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 20:37 UTC (Mon) by jhoger (guest, #33302) [Link]
Cynicism is the real enemy. Activism works... the Public Option was dead until grass roots efforts leaned on political leaders to give it a shot.
There's nothing naive about holding a politician's feet to the fire on a campaign pledge. Politicans DO pay attention to constituent feedback.
Obama is set for life on the lecture circuit after being POTUS. Do you really think he is beholden to the special interests? That doesn't mean he can get away with ignoring them if he wants to get anything done... that would be ignoring political reality.
But I think there is a lot of anger among the American People that if directed by a skillful leader, could be turned to an anti-corporatism, populist movement. All the fuel is there from the recent bailouts.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 20:52 UTC (Mon) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
Geez, the naive part was that he BELIEVED him and voted for him.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 10, 2009 0:13 UTC (Tue) by mosfet (guest, #45339) [Link]
> Geez, the naive part was that he BELIEVED him and voted for him.
Maybe Obama is even more intelligent than you think he is. The copyright law is so absurd that some people compare the situation to the prohibition area:
"It doesnt matter what the law is, if enough people are not going to obey it, then the system is going to be changed."
http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/2009/11/06/week-in-r...
So Obama may think, that this law will collapse on it's own and there are more pressing problems to address like the health care system or the several wars he inherited. Even if the copyright situation gets worse, there are not people dying from it like in the other cases I mentioned.
Fighting the "copywars" may be our duty, not his.
For more infos what can be done see Lawrence Lessig 'It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright'
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 10, 2009 18:34 UTC (Tue) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
Man, you are really stretching it aren't you. Take you head out of the liberal blogs and THINK for once.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 10, 2009 1:06 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] > Cynicism is the real enemy. Activism works... the Public Option was dead until grass roots efforts leaned on political leaders to give it a shot.Is this 'trust and you will be trusted' type logic? The people that leaned on the government was not grass roots, but major corporations. Major corporations are tired on paying the ever increasing premiums required to keep health care for their employees, however they can't drop it because their competitors would sweep in and take all the good workers. They would only be left with the workers too timid and low-quality to escape to better employment elsewere. So they were between a rock and a hard place. Either drop the health care and lose out on quality people or keep the health care and suffer through the massively increasing premiums they had to keep paying. The Public option being grass roots is a bunch of bullshit. It's about major employers leaning on the government to do something about the rising premiums. You see your employer pays a shitload to keep you in your benefits. Say you make 75,000 dollars a year... Your employer easily pays 100,000-120,000 dollars on you to keep you employed. There are a whole host of taxes and costs that are never taken into account in your paycheck, yet is reflecting negatively on your value as a employee and the ability of your employer to keep you. By having the public option they can safely drop most of your benefits and vastly reduce the cost of paying you. Then your health care is taken out of your wages in the form of tax increases. The employer then saves a shitload of money, you personally absorb a much higher chunk of the burden while your actual real compinsation as a worker drops massively... yet most people won't understand any of this because it's not in their paycheck. It's the classic case of the government swooping in and bailing out big business. Certainly reform is absolutely critical and required, but your fooling yourself if you think it's a bottom-up thing. So the "Public Option" is really designed to destroy the current insurance scheme we use to pay for health care and soften everybody up for fully socialized healthcare. Notions like 'you must accept all preexisting conditions' are not economically sustainable for insurance companies to support. They are _insurance_ not _health_care_. Like your car insurance they are designed for IF something goes wrong... the way things are going to be structured it would be similar to if you didn't bother to get insurance until AFTER the car accident.. it would be against government law to turn you down or increase your premium just because your sitting on the side of the road with a exploded Porsche. This in itself may or may not be a good thing, but it simply what is happening. The real way they are going to save costs is by forcing young people, who normally have very low premiums and good health, to financially offset the burden of supporting older people. Depending on state laws it'll increase the cost of insuring the 20-40 year olds by 200-500% (something like that), while keeping the costs for the 50-60+ relatively stable. That is the whole point of requiring everybody to have insurance, which (of course) will have the public option as the only real option. Insurance companies after about 20-30 years will merely exist as a extension of the government bureaucratic machines. ------------------------------- As far as Obama goes... FFS. He came from one of the most corrupt centers of political power that the USA has ever seen: Chicago. The level of graft and corruption coming out of that area of the country is legendary.. and is only second (IMO) to what goes on in Louisiana. This is a junior senator with little experience and he won his first election not through democratic means, but by systematically eliminating all competition through the court systems. This does not mean that he is a political monster, but this sort of thing should of hell of factored into people's decisions to believe him or not.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 11, 2009 1:06 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> It's the classic case of the government swooping in and bailing out big
> business. Certainly reform is absolutely critical and required, but your > fooling yourself if you think it's a bottom-up thing.
Actually you have it almost exactly backwards. Employer-funded insurance is good for big companies, and bad for small ones and individuals.
Money that flows into benefit plans ultimately comes out of your paycheck. It's just like employer-funded "free lunches"-- they aren't actually free, they just mean that your salary will be lower, and you'll have to eat in the same building every day (or lose some cash.)
Smaller companies in particular have big problems with health insurance. It is difficult to hire the administrators needed to manage the plan. There may or may not be a full-time human resources and legal team to handle these issues. I have worked at smaller companies before, and I can tell you, handling health claims is a pain.
Smaller companies also can't do cost sharing. In a bigger company, cost sharing works like this: you have both young, healthy people and old, sick people at the company. On average, the health care expenses balance out. That's also the way that cost sharing works in a single payer system like Britain's. British taxes pay for health care. Even though there are sick people, the cost is bearable because there are also some healthy people. In a smaller firm, a single old, sick person could make the owner's health care expenses go up by 100%, easily. He can't be amortized out because the company doesn't have enough people. Instead, he probably won't be hired at all, or will be hired at a reduced salary. Is that fair?
An employer-provided health care system like we have in the United States makes it hard to switch jobs. And if you want to take some time off to work on personal projects or be with your family, you are screwed. COBRA is just a crude hack to try to solve the worst of these problems. Like all crude hacks, it doesn't work very well.
"Health insurance" in general is stupid. Economically, insurance is based on the premise that neither side knows what is going to happen. But more and more, modern medicine can tell you years or even decades in advance what your health is going to be like in the future. If you have high cholesterol or diabetes, or the genes for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, your health care future will be a lot worse than the average.
The "perfect" health care insurance company charges you exactly the amount that you would have spent on health care anyway. Obviously, it's perfectly useless. It doesn't help share costs, and it imposes overhead in the form of paperwork and administrative expenses.
C.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 11, 2009 2:04 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
Word to the wise: Don't wrestle with a pig. You get dirty and the pig likes it.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 22, 2009 20:41 UTC (Sun) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link] But I think there is a lot of anger among the American People that if directed by a skillful leader, could be turned to an anti-corporatism, populist movement. All the fuel is there from the recent bailouts.and any politican who attempted to do anything like that AND started to become successful at it, would find that photoshopped pictures of themselves in bed with a goat and two children would be circulated everywhere. and if that didn't work, they'd be assassinated.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 10, 2009 20:36 UTC (Tue) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]
When did I say I had any expectations? At least it made me feel better for a bit.
Besides, I vote with my feet. It's very rare that I purchase software or media content with restrictive licenses for myself. Unfortunately, I can't get others in my immediate circle to do the same, but at least it's a start.
The saddest thing about the current situation is that the pigs have everyone paying monthly fees for everything now.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 17:53 UTC (Mon) by smadu2 (subscriber, #54943) [Link]
policing sounds like impossible task - how on earth would they be able to inspect huge amounts of traffic ?.
UK is pushing three strikes law which can disconnect users if they are found infringing on copyright. I would like to say both would definitely #FAIL in twitter style.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 19:22 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] It does not matter if it is impossible or not.The goal is to use this as a weapon to control corporations on the internet. Our government is used to being in control of information. They control who is allowed to speak over the radio and television and they control what is allowed to be communicated over the radio and television. Every talk show host or news broadcast is given a big book of regulations and policies that dictate to them what they are and are not allowed to talk about. And since they are in control they can threaten and manipulate news agencies and other folk. Don't do what they like and they'll kick you out of the warzone. They will enforce FCC laws that say your not allowed to own more then a certain percentage of any media market, etc etc. They love this control. For example you have your 'campaign finance reform' rules that say it is illegal for businesses to advertise for a particular candidate up to six months prior to election. The reasoning as told to us is that having corporations pump money into advertising they can manipulate your vote. The reality is that this means that only people that can afford to advertise for years and years prior to elections are the only ones that can promote their candidate. By definition the only people that can afford to do that is people in the Republican or Democrat party. People trying to run against incumbent politicians cannot afford to do that. The most effective time to promote third party or other minority candidates is just weeks leading up to a election, which is now illegal political speech. Meanwhile the news agencies, whose the government has ultimate control over their profitability, can talk about their favorite candidates as much as they want and as often as they want. There is no restrictions on what you can promote or say if your a radio broadcaster or television broadcaster. So in effect these 'campaign finance reforms' are designed so that unless your already a major political power or a owner of a news agency then you are not allowed to have your voice heard by a large number of people in a election. Except, of course, over the internet. Just like how they used 'protecting the children' and the sinking of the Titanic (the ship's SOS's were drowned out by AM radio stations on the coast) as excuses to give the FCC power to regulate who was allowed to speak and what is allowed to be spoken over our airwaves they are going to use piracy and copyright laws to establish the beginning of a system of control over the Internet. Even if the controls would never work for their stated goal of controlling copyright they can be used for keeping undesirable political views from reaching the mainstream audience. It is just a matter of time before similar restrictions on political speech (probably done through the guise of restricting hate speech and protecting the children) will prevent the average person from having a chance to have their viewpoints known outside of a small group of people. And the reason that they are using treaties is because: * Unless internet controls are established internationally they will have little effect. * Treaties are largely ignored by the American public, but once signed they automatically become Federal law. This makes them a lot easier to pass then real bills. * Treaties automatically supersede any existing Federal law, so they don't have to worry about prior laws or loopholes popping up.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 10, 2009 19:06 UTC (Tue) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]
> The goal is to use this as a weapon to control corporations on the
internet.
I thought now that China's financing US (and American live-on-credit
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 21:40 UTC (Mon) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link] policing sounds like impossible task - how on earth would they be able to inspect huge amounts of traffic ?. This is exactly the danger. The Atty. General of NY says USENET alt.* groups 'all' harbor child porn ... so Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint immediately agree to shut them down. What do they have to lose? The majority of their subscribers don't know or care that alt.cancer.support (to pick a name out of the hat) exists. Block it. Save the children! Next up? *AA says P2P file distribution is 'all' pirate movies. What do you think your ISP will do? The majority of subscribers on your ISP don't know or care if the latest version of your favorite Linux distribution is available by bittorrent. It doesn't take a lot of horsepower to block a few well known port numbers: block it. Save the starving actors!
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 22:40 UTC (Mon) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]
We need our own 3 strikes proposals to counter:
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-3-strikes-law-pro...
all the best,
drew
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 9, 2009 17:55 UTC (Mon) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
A recent Ars Technica article ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/the-acta-... ) points out that this leak isn't actually the ACTA, but a document fairly far removed from it.
Let's Act on ACTA Before it's Too Late (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 10, 2009 12:39 UTC (Tue) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]
What is to prevent someone from "leaking" faked versions of "secret" documents full of wild information as a means of pressuring the keepers of the secrets into countering the false info with correct? (Or perhaps they will counter the false with "better" false?)
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