ACTA Passed, we failed.

[Awexsome]

ACTA's good. Jesus people stop getting your opinions from conspiracy theory videos. It in itself doesn't even do anything more than our current copyright laws do. This is a good first step in trying to combat piracy on the global scale it runs.

I want no more of the "jurisdiction" loopholes that pirates like to use because they could change their jurisdiction in a day while inflicting the exact same amount of harm if they hadn't changed it.

You need a global agreement on it so everyone is clear on what's lawful and what's not because the internet is global.

-snip-

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/or8ag/ive_read_the_final_version_of_acta_heres_what_you/Here's a much longer explanation of why it's not bad. There is the possibility of countries using it to enact their own SOPA's but if used responsibly this addresses a major issue of unifying internationally the idea of international copyright law because it's really needed with how international the internet and piracy is by nature. A server hosted in Australia, owned by someone in Europe, and run by someone in South America is absolutely no different in function than a U.S. owned and operated one with servers located in Virginia so there needs to be an international understanding on how to handle copyright laws.

ACTA is in itself only a treaty. An agreement between countries on how copyright laws should internationally be enforced. If something like SOPA did pass this would make it much worse. However if a better law was passed it would make it much more effective as well.

If one's distrust of government is so severe that you have absolutely no faith that they could ever come up with an acceptable piracy law now or ever and think they should just give up then that's the only way I could see this as a bad thing.

 

[GraveeKing]

Well as long as the vast majority of Europe stays out of this it's fine with me.
Although knowing my luck the UK have probably already or will try to sign it too.

 

[maninahat]

I've had enough of companies selling us hardware that will never be ours and games that have expired. I'm hunkering down with cookies and milk and hitting my books.

No one can ACTA, SOPA or 'it's-not-yours-you-only-paid-for-the-right-to-bring-it-home' books.

My GF once has a "copy" of Harry Potter 4, fresh from the photocopiers. It had the entire first chapter missing.

Yeah, unbeknown to many of us in the West, India, China and many other places have bootlegged books along with DVDs, games, CDs etc. The real thing is fairly expensive in a developing country.

 

[Jabberwock xeno]

This was 3 months ago. A little late to the party, aren't we?

More like 2 years.

I recall helping a thread on bungie.net that went on for like 30 pages, and right before the thread died, ACTA was neutered to the point where we didn't view it as a threat anymore.

Let me see if I can find it...

Ah, here it is:

http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=47977996&postRepeater1-p=1

 

[maninahat]

Look? Guys? Will you all please calm down. Some of you are calm. That's awesome. You're all brilliant. Some of you are predicting the doom of everything you hold precious, though.

I want you all to do several things for me.

One: read the treaty itself. Throw out everything you already know if you haven't read it; just throw it all away, and read the treaty. It's likely not as bad as you think of it.

Two: If someone disagrees with your point on it, reason with them. I was accused of being bribed by the MPAA, a corporation that I associate with Dick Dastardly. That wasn't good reasoning. That was delusion. I didn't enjoy that, and their opinion was rendered void thusly.

Three: Please... stop assuming everything is evil. People are assuming that SOPA/PIPA are following onto ACTA, like it's a trend of four-lettered ending-in-"A" laws that will impede on their freedoms. SOPA and PIPA were bad apples that were going to ruin the internet forever. ACTA... not so much. It's not brilliant, it makes things harsher on law abiding citizens and it's worded vaguely enough to make that an issue. But it's not evil.

...I know, I KNOW, that people saying dumb, uneducated things on the internet is the norm. But we are discussing international politics here. Would it kill you to do your own research that didn't involve watching bloggers talk about it on Youtube? Some of you have, of course, and are siding against ACTA for well thought-out, good reasons. Others have taken a neutral stance. Some agree with it. I'm neutral to the treaty for now, of course; until its affects are actually become near enough to be called "impending" with a straight face, I'll watch and see where it goes. It's nowhere near finalized and the sentiments behind it are fair.

But I can see reasons to be both for and against this treaty, and the way it was handled and presented. If you don't, however, take some initiative and do your own research, make up your own mind, you'll come off as a screaming lunatic. This isn't a LOT that I ask. It's mostly common sense. We're discussing a fairly serious topic here and those of you who are screaming from the rooftops will only go to exasperate the desperation further. We need to be cool and calm and collected. I do hope you can deal with that.

To everyone who's done their research and is speaking from an educated viewpoint: thank you so, so much, for treating this important topic with the respect and care it deserves.

Thank you for this. It makes any comment I could make, utterly redundant by saying everything we needed to hear.

 

[superbatranger]

Heck, I thought we were past ACTA months ago. Why all the hubbub about it again?

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Well as long as the vast majority of Europe stays out of this it's fine with me.
Although knowing my luck the UK have probably already or will try to sign it too.

Already signed.

ACTA's good. Jesus people stop getting your opinions from conspiracy theory videos. It in itself doesn't even do anything more than our current copyright laws do. This is a good first step in trying to combat piracy on the global scale it runs.

I want no more of the "jurisdiction" loopholes that pirates like to use because they could change their jurisdiction in a day while inflicting the exact same amount of harm if they hadn't changed it.

You need a global agreement on it so everyone is clear on what's lawful and what's not because the internet is global.

You do know ACTA is more than a SOPA or PIPA and affects more than just internet piracy because you sound like you think it that is the gist of it. It also affects generic medicines along with various other "nice" little things.

I'm not worried about ACTA because no one else is.

If I haven't heard of it, it's probably not a big deal.

It's called trusting the people that govern Earth.

\

Look at 90% of the posts in this thread. most of them either don't understand what ACTA is or are conspiracy theorists. "Trusting DA GUBMNT" isn't going to happen.

Well yeah because they have had such a good track record in the past. Charlie Haughey tells the country to tighten its belt with the economic troubles goes out and buys £10k+ shirts. Fucking A on moral integrity from the Irish gov. By the way our old ministers for Finance also never had a bank account all those years he decided to write blank checks to people.



Just as a general note the problem a lot of people myself included have with ACTA is not the good intentions of it trying to curtail piracy but the broad language and potential for it to be quite abusive. You know the possible rise of medicine prices given that companies aims are to make money. Yes I realise medicine patents may be for another day but the ability to enforce it like this seems so wrong.

 

[willbailes]

Thank you Andy of Comix Inc, In a stupid thread I learned something. I didn't think it would be that bad.

But anyway, ACTA seems less about passing laws here, but instead getting China and Brazil up to our levels of copyright protection. Which I'm totally for.

 

[TheVioletBandit]

I'll be glad once we all get over this annoying (and slightly hypocrtical) "dah intahnet is ehn danger the gubbement is evil" phase and maybe move on to freaking out about something else. Like those aliens. Up to something, I tell ya.

Mandatory Image:

Now, In regards to my atrocious spelling habits lets conduct an experiment.

A. 2+2=4
B. two plus two equals four
C. tu plas tu ekwals four

Now although the spelling in sentence C is very poor(far worse in fact than my spelling errors)and is different than both A and B it's obvious correctness isn't negated by this fact.

And actually Sentence C is complete gibberish. Tu, plas, ekwals aren't real words, therefore there was nothing correct about sentence C.

And I'm going to have with [user]xvbones[/user] on this one; it's the constant boy-cries-wolf that has people not caring about politics. They just get so tired of dealing with people over exaggerating the impact of legislation that it's not worth it to pay attention since life won't be changed for the most part. Why do you think it took so long for SOPA protests to get started? Because people had just been bombarded by over-zealous fools who didn't know what they were talking about, and how the new NDAA is going to turn America into a fascist police state when SURPRISE! Nothing happened[footnote]Just like with the Patriot Act[/footnote].

I fully agree sentence C is complete gibberish. If your creative with language or simply deviate from the norm and spell "because" "cuz" for example it's meaning is completely lost! Only some kind of "super-genius" would be able to crack the code that is semi-phonetic spelling and gather any meaning from it whatsoever! Words, language in general must adhere to a strict set of rules that NEVER change to be understood. Colloquial speech for example is completely unintellectual because of the divergence from the standardized grammar that we learn in school. Why won't people just obey the rules that I like so I don't feel so confused and scared!

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Why is this thread even still going if it starts on a wrong presumption and grows into something worse from there? Yes, they signed the treaty a few days ago (the EU and some other countries at least), no it doesn't have any power yet, just because some representatives symbolically signed it doesn't give it legislative rights. It has to be ratified by the EU or other respective countries before it becomes law (by voting for or against it).
I opened another thread stating all this over here, including links to news about it and what else is going on or how you can prevent it: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.339993-ACTA-the-new-Danger-after-SOPA-help-defeat-it#13763752

Also this... really...

Look? Guys? Will you all please calm down. Some of you are calm. That's awesome. You're all brilliant. Some of you are predicting the doom of everything you hold precious, though.

I'd be inclined to just put up a facepalm picture and be done with it, but that would be rather counter-productive. Instead, just try reading what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/we-have-every-right-be-furious-about-acta

Or the damn guy/representative that was supposed to investigate issues with the treaty appointed by the EU parliament when he resigned not too long ago:
https://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/ACTA_rapporteur_denounces_ACTA_mascarade

Kader Arif, rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament quit his role as rapporteur saying:
"I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: 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."
"As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens' legitimate demands."
"Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications."
"This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this mascarade."

Not to mention that large parts of it are highly ambiguous and large parts of the agreement that would help interpret it are still being withheld.

Did you even read the rest of my post...? ._.'

Edit: It's funny if you didn't because I actually went so far as to encourage you to do this very thing, so you're technically a cool dude, but I did rationalize my decision to be calm, which is perhaps most important. Here I'll type it out for you:

"plz be calm cos ur scaring teh internetz ;-;"

...or something like that.

 

[Dark Knifer]

Which is why I'm trying to get the word out about this little proposed constitutional amendment [http://www.sanders.senate.gov/petition/?uid=f1c2660f-54b9-4193-86a4-ec2c39342c6c] which states that companies are NOT people and therefore do not get the same rights as people, are subject to regulation by the people, forbiding companies from making donations and/or expenditures during elections for candidates (no more buying candidates, something the MPAA head Dodd said happens), puts regulation on campaign spendings, and make all contributors to the candidates public so we can all see who's donating to who.

While it won't really stop them from introducing shitty legislation, at least with this they'll hopefully have a much harder time getting it through, since they can't more or less buy candidates with donations.

If I was from North America I would sign that. This is a very positive thing, too often I hear people bitching about politicians and they think there isn't much anything they can do about it without even trying to do anything. This sort of thing is a positive change so thankyou for raising some awareness you decent person and I hope that petition works.

 

[Dott]

Come June, filesharing online will be illegal.

 

[Andy Szidon]

ACTA does not go into affect until all countries sign it.

 

[Muspelheim]

...Huh. Seems the goverment and the entertainment-lobby really nacht und nebel'd this right over my head. Not a bad job there. *Sigh* I've got a feeling that it's best getting used to it.

The corporate apocalypse, ladies and gentlemen.

 

[oktalist]

All we can hope to do now is damage control

NO. What we've been doing up until now is ALL damage control.

Instead, rather than waiting for our opponents to draft their bills and treaties, and then protesting those bills and treaties, we should go on the offensive. Get together the anti-SOPA companies and non-profits like Google and EFF and draft our own bills and treaties and lobby governments to get them considered. Force the likes of RIAA and MPAA to sink all their lobbying resources into simply holding on to what they've got. Broaden the debate, get people questioning the relevance of these outdated institutions, obsolete companies that amount to little more than content aggregators, gatekeepers of innovation, parasites feeding on artists. Demonstrate how artists can benefit from relaxing copyright law.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/117114202722218150209/posts/4GgaRiSyaTf

http://www.google.com/search?q=SopaIsTheSymptomCopyrightIsTheDisease

 

[Gnoekeos]

Obama proves irreversibly and forever that he is a real piece of shit who just doesn't give a fuck and has SIGNED ACTA: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/us-signs-international-anti-piracy-accord.ars

I know Ireland has signed ACTA too, haven't heard about any other countries as of yet, but it's so late in the game by now that even if we knew we couldn't stop it.

So congratulations everyone! Our combined apathy and inattentiveness has completely fuced over the internet we love and enjoy.

All we can hope to do now is damage control, and stop the Trans-Pacific Parternership, WHICH IS EVEN WORSE THAN ACTA: http://www.ustr.gov/tpp
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110105/02301112524/son-acta-worse-meet-tpp-trans-pacific-partnership-agreement.shtml

And, although it goes without saying, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA

Combined Apathy and inattentiveness? Did you not see the way people came out against SOPA? Its not the fault of the people who weren't aware that those who knew very well didn't do more to spread the word of the evils of this bill but perhaps that's who you're pissed at. I personaly only heard about it very recently after SOPA was stopped and I could have sworn I heard it was getting signed in February.

 

[Shivarage]

Honestly I can't really fight this battle anymore. The media companies are refusing to adapt, and politely asking isn't going to work. They have enough money to shove these through as quickly as possible, and if this doesn't work, they're pulling every dirty trick in the book with the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act. We may be in the right here, but being on the good guy's side doesn't always mean you'll win. I give up.

I love the irony here of the media companies saying they are losing profit while they have enough to splash out on lobbyists

 

[Right Hook]

When will the "bill x IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN bill y AND WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING WE HAVE EVER HELD DEAR" stuff stop? It is getting rather annoying.

Basically we are screwed, while others have yet to form the same kind of general apathy you have for this sort of thing they eventually will as well. We will be defeated by a never ending torrent of this type of bullshit. It'll get to the point where everybody is tired of screaming and everyone is tired of listening, some giant piece of crap will get through the lines and that'll be that.