Stop Online Piracy Act

[McPwned]

And now it's time to look at our own back yard: Looks like Canada is moving towards its own SOPA: Bill C-11

I saw this a few days ago. Just... yeah.

[Cobaltsaber]

Pretty sure hollywood is behind at least half of this, kind of like oil companies....if music were an unrefined black sludge.

[Xzinum]

[WiseGuy]

cool

[ugly]

MPAA threat sparks White House petition for bribery probe

The follow up: White House Declines Comment on MPAA Bribery Petition

Two weeks ago we reported on a “we the people” petition asking the White House to investigate the MPAA’s alleged bribery practices.

A few days ago the petition reached its goal of 25.000 votes, and the Obama administration has now issued an official response.

“We appreciate your participation in the We the People platform on WhiteHouse.gov,” the note starts.

“However, consistent with the We the People Terms of Participation and our responses to similar petitions in the past, the White House declines comment on this petition because it requests a specific law enforcement action.”

As far as we know, no official complaints have been filed against the MPAA.

However, several citizen rights groups have put pressure on Congress to return “Hollywood’s dirty money.”

[ugly]

Now that ACTA is losing support they need to find other ways to force their interests on others - Make sure as few people as possible see it so they can't oppose it

At the urging of major copyright holders, the Obama administration has been working to export restrictive American copyright laws abroad. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is just the most visible component of this ambitious and long-running project.

Ars Technica recently talked to Michael Geist, a legal scholar at the University of Ottawa, about this effort. He told us that rather than making their arguments at the World Intellectual Property Organization, where they would be subject to serious public scrutiny, the US and other supporters of more restrictive copyright law have increasingly focused on pushing their agenda in alternative venues, such as pending trade deals, where negotiations are secret and critics are excluded.

The growing opposition to ACTA in Europe suggests this strategy of secrecy may have backfired. But the US is not giving up. It has already begun work on its next secret agreement, ealled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Geist told Ars that restoring balance to copyright law will require reformers to be as determined as their opponents have been. He said that donating to public interest groups that focus on international copyright issues is the best way to make sure that the public interest is well-represented.

Countries have been negotiating international copyright treaties for more than a century, but the passage of two treaties in the 1990s represented a turning point in international copyright law.

The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, signed in 1994, made protection of copyrights a requirement of membership in the World Trade Organization. Countries that failed to meet international copyright standards could face trade sanctions. The 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty further ratcheted up the minimum requirements for copyright protection—requiring, for example, that signing countries regulate the circumvention of digital rights management schemes.

WIPO's relatively open structure meant that major copyright holders didn't get everything they wanted in the 1996 treaty. For example, Geist said, the United States was unable to get the strong anti-circumvention language it preferred into the WIPO treaty.

"WIPO is a place that's more open than it used to be," Geist told Ars. "Because of the consensus-based approach, there is a necessity to engage in negotiating." Indeed, in recent years reformers have begun to make headway themselves. Treaties to liberalize copyright in ways that benefit libraries and the blind are now under consideration at WIPO.

So, Geist said, the US has increasingly engaged in forum-shopping, bypassing WIPO and pushing for stronger copyright protection in a wide variety of other venues. For example, the United States has negotiated a series of bilateral trade agreements with nations such as South Korea, Australia, and Chile. While they're branded as free-trade deals, they also require the other country to adopt the more punitive copyright regime favored by the United States.

The negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement were part of this trend. In contrast to the relatively open WIPO process, ACTA was negotiated in secret by a relatively small number of mostly wealthy countries. The developing nations who would be the most likely to object weren't invited to participate. The plan was to present the finished treaty to the world on a "take it or leave it" basis.

But the US isn't giving up. To the contrary, the US and its industry backers seem to have concluded the problem with ACTA was that they didn't try hard enough to lock down the negotiating process. So they're now plowing forward with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This time, the US has cut the leak-prone Europeans out of the process, limiting negotiations to eight countries such as New Zealand and Peru that are much easier for the United States to intimidate. Presumably, the goal is to enshrine the US's preferred copyright policies in the TPP and then use the TPP as a template for future agreements.

Once the US gets a critical mass of countries to sign a deal, it can then use other carrots and sticks to pressure additional countries to sign on. Geist said one important tool is the so-called "Special 301" list, an annual watchlist of countries Washington considers to have insufficiently strict copyright laws. Not only will countries be pressured to sign onto ACTA, the US may also press them to implement even those provisions of ACTA that the agreement itself labels as optional.

[ugly]

A quick, fun look at copyright math:

[ugly]

While governments blindly push forward to appease the entertainment industry they don't really think of some of the unintended consequences of these lawsuits: ISP: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

Until January, Megaupload was a major customer of Carpathia Hosting. Now Megaupload is facing a federal indictment, and its servers have become a major burden for Carpathia.

Carpathia is the proud owners of 1,103 servers with approximately 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on them. The government seized Megaupload's assets, so the firm can't pay its bills and Carpathia has cancelled Megaupload's service contract. But Carpathia hasn't been able to reuse the servers for other customers because doing so might interfere with the Megaupload court case or invite lawsuits from Megaupload customers who lose data as a result.

On Tuesday, the hosting firm filed a request with a Virginia federal court asking for relief from the financial burden of continuing to maintain the servers. The company estimates it pays $9,000 per day for rack space, power, and connectivity. In addition, the servers themselves are worth $1.25 million. Since Megaupload is no longer paying for service, Carpathia would like to re-allocate the servers for the use of other customers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has intervened in the case on behalf of Megaupload's users, some of whom used the service for legitimate file transfers. EFF has argued that these innocent users have a right to this data, and has threatened to sue to vindicate these users' rights.

Carpathia calls 25 petabytes an "historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data," and argues that if that data needs to be preserved, someone else—the government, Megaupload, or an interested party such as the MPAA or EFF—should bear the costs of preserving the data. The problem is that so far no one has come up with a way to satisfy all interested parties. Megaupload is willing to take custody of the data, but the government and the MPAA have both objected, perhaps fearing that Megaupload would destroy evidence. The other parties—the government, EFF, and MPAA—have all said they're not willing to take custody of the servers.

Carpathia suggests several possible resolutions. One would be to allow Megaupload to put its site back online for a limited period of time so that legitimate users could download their data; after that, the data would be deleted and Carpathia would be free to do what it wanted with its servers. Another option would be for the courts to order a third party—most likely the government or Megaupload—to take custody of (and pay Carpathia for) the servers. A third would be for the parties to pay Carpathia for the costs of continuing to maintain the servers. Carpathia wants the government to pick one of these options, because right now the situation is costing it thousands of dollars a day.

[Mike-KT]

Wow what a mess.

[ugly]

Piracy cut in half in France, yet music and movie revenues fell

France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of increasing revenues in the French music and movie industries did not materialize and revenues fell in both industries.

The French music market fell 3.9% in 2011 while the video market fell 2.7%.

As Ernesto of TorrentFreak says, “If we follow the logic employed by the anti-piracy lobby during the past decade, this means that piracy is actually boosting sales.”

If the money and manpower put into stopping piracy were redirected into innovating the industries, improving their products, and creating new technologies that will make us want to buy songs or movies instead of pirating them, they would have a much better chance of improving their bottom line. Today is a world of instant access and in many cases pirating a television show, movie, or song is simply more convenient. Many who employ P2P aren’t doing it to save 99 cents. They’re doing it because it’s easier.

The real way to make a dent in piracy, increase revenues, and save the industries is through innovation. Clinging on to antiquated models and trying to force people back into them is killing the industries faster than the negative effects of piracy.