“It’s Bad.” – The ACTA and Fear
Meet the ACTA.
Ars has a good write up here.
BoingBoing says:
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:
* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
* * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
* * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
It is not clear how accurate these accounts are, but these conjectures aren't a far cry from other US supported trade agreements.
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Reminded me of this quote from Thomas Jefferson... or rather the inverse of:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
One day the world will be run by people who grew up with the internet, of course by then there will be 'something else', and all this silliness will stop. It's actually something I wonder about often. If technology is developing at an increased rate, but humans are essentially not much more say, 'cognitively plastic' than they've ever been - will this trend to misunderstand and stymie crucial technologies continue? Me thinks so, and at an increasing rate.
Yeah Jefferson's writings on intellectual property generally are great. He couldn't have foreseen multinational companies using billions of dollars to lobby for more control of markets, like the pharmaceutical and record companies, but he was right that any copyright or patent controls are simply market restrictions favoring the creator of an idea.
One of my favorite writings on the commerce surrounding ideas and the way everyone uses the work of others whether or not they acknowledge it is "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" by Lethem.
He mentions Jefferson, saying "Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.' This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole; second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea."