Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica) [LWN.net]

ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) was called "more dangerous than SOPA" by US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), as ars technica reports. "Kader Arif, a French member of the European Parliament from the Socialist Party, had been assigned to be a rapporteur on ACTA, meaning that he was asked to study the issue and deliver a report on the subject. But he resigned in protest on Thursday. ”I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement," he said, according to one translation. "No inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.”"

to post comments

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2012 0:09 UTC (Sat) by mordae (guest, #54701) [Link] (17 responses)

Czech Pirate Party appears to be working on putting local politicians under a bit of stress so that they don't ratify ACTA on the national level, but I do not really believe that anything can prevent this **** from hitting our fans.

The problem is that ACTA *seems* reasonable as something that can prevent "huge financial losses", "help artists" and slap those "bad pirates and hackers". Changing it's image to something that introduces global wiretapping and cutting people off the Internet is not going to be easy.

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2012 1:18 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (16 responses)

What you need to do (tricky) is point out to your local politicos that those "huge" financial losses are, basically, just wishful thinking.

For example, take the alleged losses in the UK. Divide by the number of households. Compare with average income.

The media moguls are losing, on average, 120% - yes - ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY PERCENT - of average household income from each household.

Once you can start framing the losses as real, and the benefits as "pie in the sky", from this sort of legislation, any decent politician (yes I know, where do you find one of those ...) is going to look pretty askance at the media companies shenanigans.

Cheers,
Wol

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2012 10:23 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (13 responses)

That's a great way to put it! Translate their losses to a per-person or per-household amount that they expect will be paid if the situation is "fixed".

Where have "losses" numbers been published?

I've found global figures, and figures about how much a country is losing - but that would include exports. All a bit slippery. Are their any numbers for how much a company is losing, for example "from the British public"?

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2012 12:11 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Unfortunately, a lot of these figures are tricky to come by. I can't remember where I came across the UK figures. I do remember coming across, somewhere, that they expect the average person to *buy* about *twenty* DVDs a week! At £20 per DVD (yes I know that's list, not actual retail), that's the average household income blown!

And when is someone going to find time to watch those DVDs?! If they're working they have no time, if they're not working they have no money.

And even if you can't tie down the figures and can't do a bullet-proof job of it, you can use the figures the industry provides, "guess" the details you don't know, and make sure your congress-critter/MP/MEP/whatever *knows* where you've made assumptions. Blow it up in your favour - "see, they haven't give me enough detail to do a decent calculation. They're hiding it because they don't want somebody to investigate the figures, can you investigate for me?" :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 14:19 UTC (Mon) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link] (1 responses)

So, your entire argument is based on some half-remembered "facts" that you can't support with any actual evidence, and can't be bothered to do any research for. Have you considered working for the MPAA?

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 20:32 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, if you want to write to your critter, you need to do the research!

And as for "half-remembered", yes I can't remember the figures I started with. But I *DO* remember doing those calculations, and I *DO* remember coming up with the "> 100% of income" result.

And the "20 DVDs a week" figure is also a firm memory.

My entire argument is based on "if you get hold of any figures, break it down and compare it to reality".

Cheers,
Wol

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2012 22:03 UTC (Sat) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Where have "losses" numbers been published?

I suppose that's another great move by those behind ACTA: Since it's been negotiated in secret and approved without much publicly available debate (let alone public debate) we have no idea what the lobbyists have been whispering in the ears of the politicians.

At least with normal legislation the government, commissioner or parlamentarian driving some legislation has to put forwards arguments (such as financial ones) about why the legislation is needed. This text usually incorporates whatever nonsense lobbyists have been provided after which it is relatively easy to point out errors. (Whether that then has any effect is of course another question.)

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 29, 2012 22:31 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (8 responses)

Of course, the significant point is that the entertainment industry *is* losing a lot of money due to piracy of their copyrighted works. If they are inflating the numbers... well... that's not the core of the issue, is it.

We get just as upset when *our* copyright user licenses are violated. There *is* an injustice here which needs to be corrected.

The fact is that people *like* being able to pirate works of entertainment.

We should be just as outraged at the flagrant copyright violations being perpetrated against "them" as we would be about those perpetrated against our own copylefted works.

But instead, we do what we can to rally the pirating public against these efforts (misguided as they may be) to stop piracy.

If this were truly a matter of championing that which is right, and did not involve a threat to people's "right" to violate copyright when it suits them, we wouldn't be able to rally a fraction of what we have to the cause.

Hypocrisy abounds. All around. And on all sides.

-Steve

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 3:01 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Sure there is some loss and piracy is probably wrong, its one big reason I got started with Linux, so that I could use Free software without guilt bu the proportions matter. To just say that both sides are hypocritical and leave it at that is to promote a false equivalency. The fact that situations are often not equivalent seems to offend the natural sense of balance in many people. The industry is using their fabricated numbers to justify spending a proportional amount of public money, my money, to enforce rules and prosecute court cases. I have an interest in us not spending more on fraud prevention than what it's worth, and its probably not worth that much.

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 7:34 UTC (Mon) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link]

Obviously people *do* copy work with copyrights. Part of the rationale behind copying is how the contet industry treats their *customers*: Why should I not be able to watch a DVD which I bought legally in the US on my DVD-Player bought in Europe (DVD country-code madness)? Or more explicitly: Why should I bother buying content if there is no warranty that I can acually use it on my playback equipment?

Calling any of these actions "piracy" is outrageous. Pirates take over other people's ships and either rob them, or hold them hostage. How is transferring some bytes between storage devices only marginally similar to those crimes?

We care about free software licences, not copyright

Posted Jan 30, 2012 7:55 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Not at all.

We care about passing freedoms on to computer users. We invoke whatever law happens to be required.

There's no generalised support for copyright law there.

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 9:41 UTC (Mon) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

There is nothing hypocritical about believing that the real economic impact of piracy does not warrant the sort of far-reaching, ill-considered, unethical, and potentially disastrous legislation and agreements being proposed to combat it.

Quite simply, one can be against some behaviour, but also be against a specific method of combating such a behaviour. That should surely be quite obvious.

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 10:54 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (1 responses)

<i>Of course, the significant point is that the entertainment industry *is* losing a lot of money due to piracy of their copyrighted works. If they are inflating the numbers... well... that's not the core of the issue, is it.

We get just as upset when *our* copyright user licenses are violated. There *is* an injustice here which needs to be corrected.</i>

Actually, yes, they're loosing *some* money; but no fucking loss of money is EVER going to justify a restriction of civil liberties. We may be infuriated if somebody illegally copies our works, BUT we're not going to push a draconian big-brother state because of that.

There's a difference of "being mad at someone as civilian person" and "changing the laws to punish someone" (and besides, it's not even "to punish someone for a perceived injustice", it's "to grant me a rent").

And furthermore, a lot less of "copyright infringement" would take place if the copyright was put back to where it was in the early 19th century. Read this http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrighte... to see what happened (and what he predicted in 1842!)

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 31, 2012 9:40 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> And furthermore, a lot less of "copyright infringement" would take place if the copyright was put back to where it was in the early 19th century. Read this http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrighte... to see what happened (and what he predicted in 1842!)

This is an amazing read, thank you for the link :)

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 30, 2012 20:41 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

What you're missing is that all the studies show that "piracy" is, in practice, free advertising! And successful advertising, at that!

All the real studies show that heavy downloaders are heavy buyers. People who don't download, don't buy. That's certainly true of me.

There is massive hypocrisy - not least in that the labels (who *accuse* the public of pirating their works) are pretty blatant pirates themselves...

Cheers.
Wol

ACTA backfires

Posted Jan 31, 2012 11:12 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Exactly. I hope that once ACTA is in place, the copyright police have started raiding houses and shutting down websites, that the public will lose interest in unlicensed ("pirated") and licensed music from the industry cartel, at the same time.

I don't know what would come next, and perhaps (probably) this is just wishful thinking on my side. To be honest, I don't find contemporary music too compelling. The only pity is the huge catalog from the last century which is not available anywhere else and which will not enter the public domain in this century either (if ever).

Piracy numbers.

Posted Jan 29, 2012 2:36 UTC (Sun) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm speaking as part-owner of an indie game company here, so my opinion is likely biased, but in general as far as I've ever seen, most "piracy" numbers are a bad combination of fantasy, worst-case assumptions and wishful thinking.

The firmest numbers I've ever seen given were for a BBS in Ottawa a decade or so ago. It got raided and shut down, and the powers that be announced that it had been responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in piracy. I can't remember the exact figure, but it was huge.

So, you might wonder how they got the numbers. Since there weren't detailed logs, they added up the retail value of all the software on the site (Microsoft Office, Windows NT (workstation and server), lots of other expensive commercial packages), and then multiplied that by the number of dial-ins in the log. The assumption being that every time someone dialed in on their 28.8K modem, they were downloading the entire archive. Even if that person had logged in many times before.

The BBS was run by a high school student for his circle of friends, none of whom would have bought any of the software on the BBS had it not been available free. The "hundreds of millions of losses" were *entirely* fiction. The "lost" money never existed.

For the longest time, the publishing industry has taken advantage of the "piracy" sticker; it sounds like something you'd want to be against. They've made up loss numbers from whole cloth and bong hits, and if you question them they harumph that the numbers are only estimates and could be *even* *worse*. It says something about their behavior when they've managed to legitimize piracy to the extent they have; the term now has as much cachet as it does stigma.

Someone pointed out recently that the doctor who killed Michael Jackson got four years for it, but if you pirate his music you'll do five years in jail under SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. This is where we are now; you're better off getting charged with manslaughter than piracy.

I'm not sure what's to be done, personally. In Canada the two political parties most likely to run the country (Conservatives, Liberals, the former are currently in power) have been in the back pocket of the publishing industry for decades. We have occasional public consultations about copyright, and they've shamed the government into inaction several times, but it has been defense in depth; we're pushed a little further back every time.

As an indie developer, I can tell you the publishing industry is just flat-out lying when they tell you it's about the artists. The artists are getting shaken down as badly as anyone else. What this is about, what this has always been about, is control of distribution. The publishers have been exploiting their distribution monopoly ruthlessly, and now that it's threatened they're on the rampage.

So remember, we aren't talking about the "content industry" or the "media industry" here; most of these corporations don't *make* things. We're talking about the corporations who own distribution monopolies on things that other people make.

The market will destroy them eventually; they aren't useful any more. The internet has seen to that. The question is, what do we do to limit the damage until they finally die?

Piracy numbers.

Posted Jan 29, 2012 13:49 UTC (Sun) by iive (guest, #59638) [Link]

Here are some well written articles about the realities in the entertainment industry.

Courtney Love does the math.
Hollywood Accounting.
And let's not forget the recent writers strike.

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2012 3:00 UTC (Sat) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (4 responses)

The saddest thing about what these so-called leaders are doing is that most of the time, people just buy the media or lease it at a monthly rate from their cable or satellite provider, or if they're kids and too poor, they usually wind up purchasing the goods when they grow up - at least, the ones that were worth purchasing. This whole business is a farce, and the perpetrators (or their follow-ons) will eventually wish they hadn't gone this way. All they do with this stuff is lower and lower the leadership's credibility, until eventually, no one bothers to listen any more.

Always look at the bright side of life

Posted Jan 28, 2012 10:56 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

On the plus side, maybe people will stop consuming industrial music and turn to friendlier sources. It is a bold move to think that content for the masses is worth more than an Internet connection. Seriously.

Always look at the bright side of life

Posted Jan 28, 2012 11:47 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (2 responses)

Hey! Don't bash industrial music, it's the best kind.

Always look at the bright side of life

Posted Jan 28, 2012 12:07 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, I meant "music from the industry cartel".

Always look at the bright side of life

Posted Jan 28, 2012 14:18 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

I guessed as much, I just couldn't resist a lame joke :)

ACTA protest in Poland

Posted Jan 29, 2012 15:45 UTC (Sun) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

The register about polish lawyers AGAINST acta :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/27/acta_protests_in_...

Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

Posted Jan 31, 2012 16:05 UTC (Tue) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Did ACTA keep the provision(s) for criminalising patent infringement? That could make using an awful lot of software into a crinimal offence, which is clearly totally inappropriate. patents on software are a wrong in themselves, or at best highly contentious. To make accidental infringement criminal is obviously totally out of proportion. THese was a fuss about this a while back, so it's possible that this particular provision did not make it ino the final text. Anyone know? And are we actually allowed to read it yet?