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Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates
IainB:
...Here's a nice hat for you to wear. After I plug it in, you'll feel a lot better. (Neurocranial stimulation of endorphins.)
-TaoPhoenix (September 09, 2012, 10:14 AM)
--- End quote ---
Those hats sound kinda gud!
Want one. Far out man...
IainB:
I had to read this post in SoftwareInformer twice over because I couldn't believe that it wasn't a joke, but no, it is apparently a post made in all seriousness by someone whom I can only presume to be either on Happy-Happy pills or to have been lobotomised:
Anti-Piracy Work Resulted In 14 Cases
Nova Vozrak, Editor
Informer Technologies, Inc.
3 days ago (2012-09-06)
About two years ago, in 2010, a tool to fight digital piracy was created in France. The organization was called Hadopi. It was established to receive requests from copyright holders for takedowns of French IP addresses trying to download files with illegally obtained media via P2P.
According to the data presented by Mireille Imbert-Quaretta, the President of the Commission for Rights Protection (part of the Hadopi agency), for the period of almost two years, among 3 million IPs registered by Hadopi 1.15 million were found pirating data. These people were sent a letter notifying them about their infringement. Six percent of them communicated back to discuss the matter. The second wave of warning letters counted 102,854 cases, among which 24 percent responded. From these only 304 received the third warning. This time 75% interacted with the committee. As a result of these steps, on July 1, only 14 offenders of the law had a case filed with the French court, the legal measure Hadopi is allowed to use if the third warning is ignored. Still, none of them have been taken to the trial yet.
Even though the President of the Commission for Rights Protection considers these to be good results, in 2012 the existence of the committee is put under question. The new President of France, François Hollande, wants to replace Hadopi with something else. Upon taking the post, he has appointed a new French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, who seemed to be intended on closing Hadopi. In August, she pointed out that this organization costs a lot: "In financial terms, [spending] €12 million (which is about $14.86 million) and 60 agents—that’s expensive [just] to send a million e-mails."
In general, if we believe the numbers, the project proved effective in teaching French people about legal matters of data spreading over the Internet. And according to Mireille Imbert-Quaretta's words that was the actual idea behind the project.
--- End quote ---
Just to order the facts to make sure I have this aright:
* A French government agency called Hadopi was established in 2010 as "a tool to fight digital piracy". It was to receive requests from copyright holders for takedowns of French IP addresses trying to download files with illegally obtained media via P2P.
* Results: 14 offenders of the law had a case filed with the French court, the legal measure Hadopi is allowed to use if the third warning in a 3-step warning process is ignored. None (zero, dinada, aucun) of them have so far been taken to trial.
* The costs of this humungus operation were either $14.86 million/pa or a total of that for the two years (a lot of taxpayers' money, in whichever way you look at it).
* This is according to the data presented by the President (Mireille Imbert-Quaretta) of the Commission for Rights Protection (part of the Hadopi agency), who considers these to be good results.
* In 2012 the existence of the Commission/Hadopi has been brought into question by the new President of France (François Hollande), who wants to replace Hadopi with something else, so has appointed a new French Minister of Culture (Aurélie Filippetti), who seems to intend closing Hadopi. Filippetti commented that:
"In financial terms, [spending] €12 million (which is about $14.86 million) and 60 agents—that’s expensive [just] to send a million e-mails."
--- End quote ---
* The author of the post (Nova Vozrak) states that: "In general, if we believe the numbers, the project proved effective in teaching French people about legal matters of data spreading over the Internet. And according to Mireille Imbert-Quaretta's words that was the actual idea behind the project."
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Que?
Amazing. Presumably this is the sort of prudential government spending which has accelerated the freedom-loving socialist country's economic spiral into bankruptcy. (/sarc)
IainB:
A third cogent post about the TPP at the PublicKnowledge's PolicyBlog provides a useful overview of the infeasibility issue of "temporary copies" prohibition in the context of the TPP:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks.)
Failing to Understand the Needs of the 21st Century: The TPP and Temporary Copies
By Sherwin Siy | September 10, 2012
This is the third post in our our series on how a US proposal for a copyright chapter in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) would hurt the rights of citizen’s in the 21st century. That proposal was leaked on the Internet in February last year. For more details on the TPP, check out tppinfo.org.
By reading this post, you have made copies of a copyrighted work. In fact, this is true of any copyrighted work you view on an electronic device. That copy is sitting in your computer or your phone's RAM, and likely also in a cache in its long-term storage. Streaming online video, even if you don't save it to your hard drive, still means that a copy of that video is made on your computer: bit by bit, the entire video is copied into a buffer before it gets played to you.
So are those everyday uses copyright infringement? It's highly unlikely under US law. But if the TPP has its way, they might.
The very first paragraph of the TPP's copyright section (at least as of February 2011, which was the last version of the agreement to be leaked to the public) says,
Each Party shall provide that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms have the right to authorize or prohibit all reproductions of their works, performances, and phonograms, in any manner or form, permanent or temporary (including temporary storage in electronic form).
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It's that insistence that "temporary" reproductions, including "temporary storage in electronic form" be part of the author’s reproduction right that raises some real questions. Every digital file that's opened on a computer has reproductions made of it in RAM—temporary storage in electronic form. Even a CD player that has anti-skip protection does the same thing—music is copied into a digital buffer (temporarily) before it's streamed to the audio output. DVRs do the same thing with incoming TV signals. Every piece of software you run is also copied into your computer's RAM.
A few different legal principles prevent all of these things from being illegal under US copyright law. Some instances of a copyrighted work are so fleeting—lasting only fractions of a second, that they aren't even considered "copies" for the purposes of the law. Others might be considered fair uses, while still others might fall into specific exemptions written in to US copyright law for software use.
This doesn't mean that temporary copies can never infringe copyright, but the language in the TPP seems to say a lot more than that. It expressly defines temporary copies as infringing, and then reiterates that temporary electronic copies are infringing. It's certainly possible to read that as not making RAM copies and buffers illegal prima facie, but it's not the most intuitive reading of it. And potential interpretations are incredibly important in the context of international agreements. A particular phrase in a treaty can be easily read one way by an American lawyer, and completely differently in the context of Australian or Chilean law. This is particularly salient in copyright law, a field where very few countries have a system of limitations and exceptions to copyright as strong as US-style fair use.
And since proponents of the TPP are particularly concerned with its promised benefits for US industry, what effects would a ban on temporary copies have for the American tech sector? US-based makers and exporters of devices that make temporary electronic copies of everything they encounter as a matter of course (computers, smartphones, tablets, DVRs) could face liability for the copies they make of copyrighted material in other countries. The same is true for cloud-based services that make temporary copies, like search engines caching websites. Would Apple need to be concerned about running afoul of New Zealand copyright law when a user in Auckland streamed a rugby match? Would Google face liability in Singapore for caching an article on the Straits-Times website?
This isn't the first time that this temporary copy language has appeared in trade agreements—the US has signed bilateral free trade agreements with Colombia, Korea, Australia, and others that include similar language. Including it in a multilateral treaty simply further enshrines a bad idea, makes it even harder to fix, and creates more opportunities for harm from that language than has already been risked with bilateral trade partners. Removing the temporary copies language doesn't prevent those existing bilaterals from doing their current work, and it wouldn't create any inconsistency with other international agreements. It does, though, remain inconsistent with US law.
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TaoPhoenix:
The Rather Not Safe For (Judges?) reply to that kind of thing would be to post a mean vicious slam against the **AA with a strange license, something like "the following groups are granted access to this piece - the EFF, the ACLU, (etc etc). For everyone else, All Rights Reserved."
Then when they get upset, it's all "Oh, I'm sorry, where did you get your copy? I don't see my check for $375,000 now, do I? Oh, that's right, that's because laws only apply to the big boys, never to the little guy. I'm voting your reps out of Congress. KThxBye"
Renegade:
>:(
...just...
>:(
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