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If you are unaware of the existence and nature of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) this article “ACTA — A Patriot Act For the Internet” by James Love in the Huffington Post is a good one for getting your spidey sense tingling. Some choice quotes:

“The term “counterfeiting” is designed to demonize the agreement critics as friends of organized crime, much like the name of the Patriot Act seemed better than the “Elimination of Civil Liberties Act.”

…

“[On the subject of ACTA] The entire U.S. tech sector has been publicly silent”

…

“If you are a lowly member of the public, the text is secret. The names of persons who attend the meetings are secret. The titles of the documents are secret. If you represent a big firm or law firm — pretty much any big firm it seems, the U.S. government will show you documents after you sign a non-disclosure agreement - curbing your right to speak out on the contents of the documents you see.”

…

“There is a lot at stake. Civil rights, privacy, rules for injunctions and damages against businesses and individuals, chilling of speech, the first sale doctrine, the global movement of medicines and other commodities, etc, will all be impacted by this ridiculously secret negotiation.”

Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/acta—-a-patriot-act-for_b_345000.html

Concerned yet? I thought so. Anyone living within a putative democracy would be.

Given that the article is so short, my quotes almost certainly stretch the (endangered) notion of “fair use” to breaking point. As should be obvious, I am making no attempt to pass off the above as my writing, I run no adverts on this blog and do not gain commercially from it in any way. The quotes above are from an article that is, in effect, a political rallying cry and I reproduce them here in that spirit. The ACTA conspiracy (for that’s what it is) is a cynical betrayal of the culture of democracy, transparency and openness. Please forward links to the Huffington Post article, or any of those listed below, to people that you know.

Other useful articles on ACTA (in no particular order) that have been published in the last few days:

• The Great ACTA Lie Revealed
• More ACTA Details Leak: It’s An Entertainment Industry Wishlist
• Leaked ACTA Internet Provisions: Three Strikes and a Global DMCA
• The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together
• ACTA: Choking Digital Economy By Increasing Liability Risks For Intermediaries.
• ACTA’s All-out Assault on the Internet
• WIPO Boss: ACTA Should be Open, Transparent
• Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest

Charles Nesson, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School:

“the idea of imposing law on the global ocean of free bits that has flooded into cyberspace is a gross and harmful over-extension of the power of the state and authority of the law.”

Source: Judge rejects fair use as Tanenbaum P2P trial begins

Nancy Gertner, judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts:

[Judge Gertner] then concluded by telling the RIAA lawyers that they were “basically bankrupting people, and it’s terribly critical that you stop it.”

Source: How Harvard Law threw down the gauntlet to the RIAA

UPDATE: So much for the encouraging sentiments. The trial didn’t go well. The Register was less than impressed with Charles Nesson’s tactics.

Kick me again, RIAA. Please!

Insanity, just fucking insanity. The world is going mad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yPmtQDWZ1s

Gestapo > Stasi > Khmer Rouge > Copyright industry: all disrespectors of human rights and enemies of free people and society.

I think it’s about time that people started to refuse to buy copyright governed media from the large copyright holding corporations. Let’s buy direct from independents, cut out the SWAT team-backed “entertainment” corporations who invade our privacy and connive with government, threatening our lives and our families with arrest and prosecution in order that their tired, outmoded and increasingly unfeasible business model can survive.

We need an entertainment equivalent of the Grüne Punkt, a sign that media doesn’t come bundled with trojan horse licensing conditions which, once brought into our homes and lives, then threaten our rights and liberty. “Big content”, from here on in it’s going to be a slippery slope all the way down to your demise.

Oh, and while I’m talking about the copyright Stasi, here’s the latest consumer-rights friendly news from Glyn Moody’s blog:

Why Everyone Hates the PRS

Fantastic, Jake is going to grow up in a world where some black-kevlar clad, combat-fantasizing thug working on behalf of the entertainment industry may end up pointing a Heckler and Koch at his chest, commanding him to “Step away from the iPod”.

Bastards, how dare they do this to us! How dare they betray our hard won freedom like this — and for such trivial reasons!

EDIT: OK, comparing litigious corporate copyright holders to the Khmer Rouge may have been over-egging the rant, just a tad… but I make no apologies for invoking the totalitarian spectres of the Gestapo and the Stasi, certainly not given broader legal and political trends at present.

Seen on Glyn Moody’s Twitter feed:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0902/S00360.htm

The Open Rights Group has produced a video that neatly encapsulates the objections to the EU’s proposed Copyright Term Extension Directive:

How copyright extension in sound recordings actually works

(If you don’t have Flash installed, an Ogg Vorbis version can be found here)

This is a directive that the Max Planck Institute in Munich, The University for Information Law in Amsterdam,  The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law in Cambridge and The Centre for Intellectual Property Policy Management in Bournemouth have unanimously agreed is unjustified, going so far as to jointly declare it as “a deliberate attempt to mislead the European Parliament” (Source? See the above video).

I’ve left it rather late (but hopefully not too late) to urge anyone reading this to contact their MEP with regard to this matter. Background information and MEP contact details can be found here.

… you know, in case there’s anything “illegal” on their players?

MPAA asks Obama for More Copyright Surveillance of the Internet

For “Big Content” and copyright holders, the advent of the digital consumer age was akin to walking off a Road Runner-style cartoon cliff. Despite the fact that there is no longer any solid ground beneath its feet, the industry is demanding that governments, ISPs and hardware manufacturers lay down paving slabs as it walks out into the void in order to stop its outmoded business model from crashing down to the foot of the cliff below (which is where nature thinks it should be). If no one co-operates in the laying down of those slabs, the business will fall, not to its death, but it will take a big hit. Its current model, that of treating digital information as if it were a “physical” product, is incapable of defying gravity without plenty of artificial support.

The situation of the traditional copyright holder model is obviously very precarious. Nature wants it down on the valley floor, and copyright holders are naturally afraid. If they are going to defy nature, they’re going to need something less precarious than ad hoc slabs, they’re going to need some serious, gravity-defying structure. And so Big Content is lobbying governments, hardware manufacturers and ISPs around the world to persuade them to contribute to the building of a huge, solidly engineered bridge, designed with the express purpose of preventing its out-moded business model from crashing and burning.

In itself, this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing perhaps, but the problem is that the bridge can only be built by forcing consumers to contribute by surrendering computing power, their consumer rights, and their right to privacy, all of which are needed to build and maintain that bridge. What’s more, all consumers need to be forced to acquiesce, including those that have no interest or involvement in the business model that needs the profit support life-support machine. Moreover, there is no destination for the bridge, no “far side” of the canyon, it will just extend out into space and will need to continue on indefinitely — and it will need to be extended at the speed at which the traffic it carries travels, no mean feat of engineering! How realistic and sustainable does this sound to you?

The destiny of computers as a technology is not to serve copyright holders, the functionality of computers should not be limited in order to protect their financial interests. Putting your copyrighted material on my computer is a privilege, and if you ask me nicely I’ll let you do it. If you start wagging your finger in my face,  telling me what I can and can’t do with your precious content when it’s on my machine, then frankly, you can shove it. I don’t want anything on my property that gives someone else the legal right to tell me what to do with that property. Go and build your own self-serving machines, and leave those of us who want a computer rather than a proprietary media player, in peace. Copyrighted material is just one of many types of content. It is selfish, greedy, presumptuous and authoritarian of the content industry to attempt to rein in and cripple the power of two of the most awesome tools (the computer and the Internet) mankind has yet devised. The tail shouldn’t wag the dog, after all.

I’ll go further, if the “information economy” can only function if consumers are stripped if their rights and routinely threatened with legal action and arrest, then the information economy (at least in the form that Big Content wishes to see), will cease to be viable. Engaging in continual guerilla war with your customers is not a sustainable business strategy!

Reading about the latest developments with regard to the ACTA conspiracy* finally persuaded me to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, making a small donation in the process. It’s something I should have done years ago.

At the top of the membership confirmation page was the line:

“Hi Friend of Freedom”.

It’s a rhetorical, trite phrase, but it made me feel good. I shall endeavour to donate whenever funds permit.

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*conspiracy noun (conspiracies) 1 the act of plotting in secret. 2 a plot. 3 a group of conspirators.

Measures like the infamous music tax will hopefully never gain serious purchase among copyright lobbyists and those within government (even Feargal Sharkey thinks it’s an unworkable idea). But the increasing efforts of the content industry to capture the internet (or at least take greater control of it) with the help of government, should be viewed with alarm and suspicion, in my view.

I’m reminded of the old joke in which a young man is talking to a friend and says:

“When I was fourteen, I thought the old man was so ignorant I could barely stand to have him around; now I’m twenty-one and I’m amazed at how much he’s learned in the last seven years”.

I’m beginning to feel like this with regard to Richard M Stallman’s views on copyright. When I first read some of RMS’s writings, probably around the turn of the century, I thought that they were ahead of their time at best, extreme at worst. Now though, his views on the destiny of human-kind to use computers to their full potential, on the essential incompatibility of traditional copyright notions and digital technology, on why so much “piracy” is not theft, and his views on the attempts by copyright holders to lobby for enforcement measures that erode our civil liberties and even damage our civic society, no longer seem so far fetched at all. In fact, the last time I read “Why software should not have owners“, an essay the thesis of which I once rejected as too extreme, I just found myself nodding at each claim, as if it were a statement of the obvious and largely a matter of common sense.

With each new copyright-related news story, I’m increasingly coming around to the view that we can have an information society, but not an information economy, at least not where the latter implies the primacy of powerful copyright trolls and enforcers, sitting in glass and steel towers, remotely monitoring the digital equipment in, and data flows to and from, citizens’ homes. Combine this with the increasingly pervasive government surveillance and extortion-masquerading-as-punishment of citizens, those tracking devices in our pockets AKA mobile phones, DNA databases and other Orwellian developments besides, and we’re rapidly creating a society that given the choice, few sensible people would aspire to live within.

I’m beginning to think that the day is not far off when admitting selling digital equipment or services to a government department or to major copyright holders will be about as socially acceptable as admitting to being a developing world arms dealer. Extreme? Check back in seven years and let’s see.

UPDATE: Underscoring the timeliness of this post, here are the latest proposed measures by the UK government in its attempt to introduce the same degree of surveillance of the Web as many other of the UK’s public spaces currently enjoy. Next stop: On-the-spot fines for writing “offensive” blog articles? Freedom of expression was overrated anyway, wasn’t it?