SECRET draft copyright treaty LEAKED: Meet the Trans-Pacific Partnership The text of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) isn't as bad as we thought. It's worse. A draft, published by Wikileaks, offers a patent-and-copyright wish list that would see the infamous DMCA automatic take-downs spread throughout the Pacific, plants and animals become patentable with few restrictions, …
The profits-before-people train is coming through. Get off the tracks or you'll become collateral damage.
When did governments stop representing us and start representing corporations *to* us? I don't recall a specific turning point but it certainly seems to be the default these days.
Who are you sir?! You are perhaps one the few people I've ever heard who understands this connection!
'Tis probably many more than you think. I learned it at school years ago.
I'll prove the point, just Google this:
East India Company Flag
The moment I saw this sight many years ago the connection forever gelled in my mind. And it ought to for most.
'Stars and Stripes forever' -- well stripes anyway!
(...And school also taught me that's where the stripes came from too).
They where actually worse then today's companies (so far, it might not get any better). For instance the East India Company ruled what is today's India, Pakistan and other countries. You can find details on Wikipedia under "Company rule in India". They also had there own set of laws, as do companies in the U.S today (and UK). Companies having there own laws is not so popular around the world today and never has been.
You can find laws related to East India Company on archive.org under "The law relating to India and the East-India Company; (1855)".
This restriction is because MPA and RIAA do not and have and do not want to have any understanding of technology. You can forget that this people want to understand the internet and how it works. All this people want and think about is greed and nothing else.
I reckon the East India Company and similar organizations are owed the credit for pioneering the ramming of commercialism onto the consumer via government writ. Now we've got the power of technology so they can continue those practices at cyber speed. Yay Progress! I guess. .... Don Jefe Posted Wednesday 13th November 2013 23:09 GMT
Actually, ...... and this is terrifying to oppressing establishments and causing them to increasingly catastrophically over-react and in so doing self-destruct with the knowledge of their actions increasingly recognised as being only self-serving and inequitable ..... now we've got the power of technology can those practices be stopped and/or remodelled at cyber speed, which be progress indeed with such deeds.
And there be no guessing involved by those and/or that [if you think markets are controlled virtually autonomously by machines and quant algorithms] which be responsible for such a changed reality and virtualised reality, DJ, for of course would it be both ..... and in Advanced IT Centres and Remote Media Command and Virtual Control Circles, a Live Operational Virtual Environment with SMARTR IntelAIgent Networks providing Web Access to Power and Currency Drivers via User Browser Portals/Register Node Points.
Invest in that chuck wagon train and worlds will beat a path to your door for more and more and more of the same which will be always progressively better and wonderfully different, for such is just natural evolution by QuITe Sublime IntelAIgent Design for/from Global Operating Devices.
Short memory, eh? If you think that crony capitalism is a product of the last 40 years, you're sadly mistaken and quite naive. I suspect examples extend back 100s of years, but I know you can see the effects as early as 1929, once Herbert Hoover took over in the US and Ramsey McDonald came back into power in Britain.
I suspect examples extend back 100s of years, but I know you can see the effects as early as 1929...
Right the first time. One of the big political issues that drove the then-colonies into revolt were the monopolies imposed on them that were disadvantageous to the locals (see also "taxation without representation"). The methods did not change under the newly created government, only those who benefitted from them (see also "Andrew Jackson" and "spoils system").
Looking through the bullet points, I don't see a lot of any good. Copyright as it was originally designed included a balance between protecting the rights of the creator and the public good. There is not even a pretense of balance in the parts that are being presented in the article.
Umm people have been getting fucked over on this planet for thousands of years.
It's only in the last 100 that we've developed the technology to grow a large population of many billions ripe for fucking, and the computer technology and social sciences needed to fuck them all quickly and efficiently.
When did governments stop representing us and start representing corporations
The question raises an interesting point about this article. When it says "America wants" or "NZ opposes" etc, who exactly is it talking about? Is this a government committee, a private industry rep, a bored civil servant, or what? Where exactly in "government" is this being discussed?
Is there any evidence for the assumption that governments have ever represented the people? I suspect this is highly doubtful. This is the old saw about 'is crime rising or is it simply being reported more openly?'
While the internet has the power to enable particularly corrupt gangsters like American Big Media and its lackeys in the US government to control the world in order to slake their own mindless materialistic greed, it also enables us the people, courtesy of the likes of Wikileaks, to expose and damn them. It should also enable us, courtesy of the many exceedingly clever people the internet lets us connect with, to defeat them.
There is a story in fairy-tale land about 'killing the golden goose' which should be instructive to us, trying to deal with an organisation so consumed with and blinded by greed that it cannot think rationally. The MAFIAA's golden goose is us - we, the people. We are the ones who lay its golden eggs, and if we stop doing so it will wither and die. If we don't, it will be our civilisation that withers and dies.
If some crappy video of a farting cat can get the interest of millions of people, surely some clever folk can produce a meme to fill the public with such revulsion for corrupt American Big Media that millions will be persuaded to stop buying from it. Then perhaps, like the proverbial phoenix, real art and creativity can be encouraged to rise, above the ashes of the current grasping, sickening dross. Remember the Ratner story.
A massive, world-wide boycott of the next blockbuster movie, which smug MAFIAA bosses confidently expect to give them a financial orgasm, would send a useful shot across their bows. Big Media is hellbent on turning us all into literal slaves, trapped forever in terror of "stealing' some thug's copyright whenever we open our mouths. It has to be stopped. Is this the sort of 'civilisation' we want to pass on to our children?
"Daddy, was it you lot who handed these bastards control of our world?"
OK, just let me get your plan straight in my head, you think you can interest the same people who are mesmerized by a farting cat, get them to reject big media, and think (what you consider to be) real art and creativity will rise up in its place?
Why do you not think more videos of farting cats would not fill the void left by big media, since these people you're convincing with this magic meme of yours have already demonstrated their interest in farting cats?
You are correct, but they started representing 'special interests' about the same time hundreds of millions of morons decided to vote for whoever told the most lies in the media, leaving politicians in a position where they had to whore themselves to the highest bidder if they wished to keep their job.
We get the government we deserve.
How does one patent an animal? Can I patent bacon? Is there not prior art in the form of the animal itself?
Not really surprised that my own country is asking for Copyright limits to be applied globally. It is the only country that has a longer limit on copyright duration, being 10 years more than in the US post-Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
Hopefully the leaking of TPP to the public will bring up a SOPA-style shitstorm; that was what killed the infamous ACTA as well.
unfortunately, just like PIPA and SOPA, ACTA is not really dead; all of the pro-copyright legislation will eventually be implemented as a series of smaller laws and treaties so that the erosion of rights is more gradual and not as noticeable to the end user.
you don't go bankrupt - the state does. Of course, since business and the state seem to be getting cosier by the minute, it's likely that any company charged with copyright crimes would see the charges dropped - depending on factors such as size of donations to election campaigns etc.
wow. I really don't want to live in Australia anymore. If any of these laws get passed and someone is found guilty of something, it will have some hideous interactions with our laws on illegal wealth, where the cops can confiscate any stuff which you can't which may have been earned through illegal means.
Pirated MS Office or Windows? Used it to write an application for a job which you got? We'll take your house, car and clean out your bank account while we are at it. Get me off this planet.
Don't believe any of the old bollocks and hype about Australians being stand-up, defy-at-all-odds, revolutionaries - none of it was ever true, it was all propaganda, smoke, hot-air and bullshit, always.
As a nation we LOVE to bend over and take it right up the colon from the lowest, highest, or in fact any bidder.
Many big corporations, and prominently the American ones (you can find examples in the books of Edwin Black), have profited enormously from World War I and World War II, from the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, as it is ever more difficult to start new conflicts for the benefit of the American military-industrial complex (vide Syria), the greedy psychopats look to other, creative ways of domination and exploitation. To me, the moronic ideas of a new world order coocked up by the bild erberg club looks like the Orwell's 1984 come true. Let's not fool ourselves - all this patent and copyright racket ( as well as the "Patriot" Act) go against the American Constitution, against the law, encourage criminal activities by non-elected officials and are against reason. What they actually do is they put big corporations above the law, free to kill (Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa) in remote locations, free to criminalize in all other locations, and free to eternally enslave us, so that eventually all of us work in the same conditions as the people who today work for Apple in the Foxconn factories in China. Unless we demand from our elected representatives to block this sick legislation, the slave sweatshop is the 21st century direction for the humanity (and this prophecy does not apply to the corporate members of the board).
Orwell's 1984 come true
Wrong book. Nineteen Eighty-Four1 describes a straight-up oligarchic totalitarian state. What we're seeing is the corporatist bread-and-circus of Brave New World and the like.
This isn't surprising. Heilbronner noted in 21st Century Capitalism that the fatal flaw of central planning was the lack of tension between the state and a powerful private sector; that tension on the one hand limits the excesses of both and on the other spurs innovation (through competition). But it also creates powerful incentives for the public and private sectors to mirror one another, by becoming twin domains for the same actors even while they remain separate in principle. Politicians are businesspeople.
Don Jefe was correct to refer to the East India Company, but more generally it was the rise of the stock corporation and other forms of self-organization among the bourgeoisie which started us down this path. In other words, we've been on it ever since the beginnings of Early Modern Europe. Of course governments before that were no friends to common folk; it's just that government organized around real estate and the hierarchical control over populations - i.e. feudalisms of various sorts - are inherently hostile to industry.
When the bourgeoisie wrested control of the polis from the aristocracy, by introducing far more efficient economic structures,2 they made things better for the middle class, which was by and large a Good Thing; but mostly they made things better for industry and its owners. And once that ball starts rolling, there doesn't seem to be any stopping it.
1Orwell preferred the title spelled out. In fact, he didn't even want to name it after a particular year; that was his publisher's influence. Of course, this is an area where publishers often show some wisdom, else we might have had Baz Lurhman's overproduced version of The High-Bouncing Lover last year.
2This also led to the downfall of institutional slavery, as Eric Williams famously argued (though he likely borrowed the thesis from C. L. R. James). Plantation slavery couldn't compete with wage slavery under capitalism; slavery produces a very inelastic labor force.
...because the material falls under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). Please desist from protesting, posting dissenting comments on websites, and reading inflammatory material (I.E. the news). Go back to watching TMZ and reading the Daily Mail.
Ah, you're thinking of european prisons, where the focus is on rehabilitation, the prisoners have rights and the system costs money, whereas the US prison system focuses on punishment, removal of rights and is so profitable a whole percent of their adullt population is in jail, where prisoners are paid 25c an hour if they work, or they can go to solitary. A workhouse.
"But Jubs, I'm not an american, and we don't have those prisons here"
You also don't have eternal copyright and monsanto doesn't own the rights to your dog, at least not until the paperwork is signed off eh?
As an aside, this whole thread has blown my mind, this clearly isn't the world I thought it was and certainly not the world I want my children to inhabit.
is not to buy their stuff. Don't buy...
Anything blu-ray
DVDs until they are in the remainder bin
The problem with doing those two is that the bastards just then use it as an excuse to try and push this kind of shit through - oh our profits are down, evil pirates everywhere....
Even if people weren't buying because all their content was shit (getting that way), they seem to have established that lower profits must only happen as a result of copyright infringement.
It's a catch-22 really, don't buy and they'll try this stuff, do buy and you're lining their pockets (and they'll still try this stuff).
Somehow I think it's almost more productive to try and devise a way to stop the planet for long enough for me to hop off....
This post has been deleted by its author
Wow.
I just peeled off a three page rant.
And then decided not to post it -- a lot of it was almost incoherent.
Its bad enough that the objectives in here feed only CORPORATE interests, but that the effort was done entirely or at least attempted entirely in secret turns my stomach.
Government of the people by the corporates for the corporates.
This makes it clear how wrong things really are in the world today.
10 minutes of relevant listening
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0zp9uX9B6I
(yeah its youtube, you don't have to comment ya know)
In America, our government tried to hide the spying that it is doing on American citizens from the Citizens. Snowden exposed this. However the governments response was go proceed with spying on every citizen with full speed ahead. Now the US government is trying to hide this from the American people. When are the people in the US going to realize that there is a hot war going on between them and the US government benefiting major corporations?
Seems one thing's been left out of this piece of toilet paper: a copyright trade embargo for any country that signs the treaty but does not ratify it. This would put pressure on the various signatory governments to ratify it since this would be enforceable by the ones that DO ratify it, barring the non-ratifiers from obtaining any copyrighted content from ratifying countries.
Sort of like how American states set a drinking age of 21 because they don't want to lose federal transportation support.
George Orwell warned us about this in his iconic work "1984".
As it stands, every time I play a DVD at the moment if it is (1) damaged and my player has kludged "read no matter what" firmware and HW mod, (2) purchased from any second hand shop, (3) copied, format shifted, or otherwise transferred through an "unauthorized" device such as through a Macrovision filter so it will play on my antique circa 1997 TV, I'm breaking the law.
Bluray is even worse, you have to be connected to the Internet just to play a disk due to the requirement for firmware upgrades and woe betide you if you happen to still have dialup or 3G dongle because it will NOT work.
At this point the gloves are off, Its time the MPAA and M*ns*n*o had a wake-up call.
We the people DEMAND action, this bill has to die before we end up enslaved.
AC but I am human and have ethics.
See
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/us-trade-deal-full-frontal-assault-on-democracy
The worrying feature of this treaty (discussed in the link) is that it gives American corporations the ability to sue democratic countries for, for example, not allowing their mining exploits on environmental grounds.
It is a race to the bottom.
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