Moose Jaw Forum

SOPA is bad - Defend our freedom to share‏!

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet into a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe, down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn, that none wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the American people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
Source: http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt

Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h2dF-IsH0I

As cyberspace turns its attention to the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been quietly signed or ratified by most of the developed world and is arguably the biggest threat to Internet freedom yet.

­ACTA has – officially – been in the works since 2008, and was signed by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea in 2011. All negotiations were held behind closed doors, and it is mostly thanks to Internet hacktivist groups like Anonymous that news of the potential damage ACTA could cause has spread.

Source: http://rt.com/news/acta-internet-censor-treaty-591/

The demise of SOPA and PIPA, as temporary as it may be, means attention is now turning to ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

ACTA is a trade agreement, that has already been signed by the United States, and is even worse than SOP/PIPA.

Trade Agreements do not require the same type of scrutiny, that bills and laws do, so ACTA was able to squeak by unnoticed.

Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and, the United States, are all signatories, but pressure is already being applied to other countries, to join. The EU has not yet signed ACTA but has to do so before May 2013.

The BRIC group of emerging nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China – are not part of the ACTA movement, and have no serious incentive to join. The Indian government may even be forming a movement to counter the act.

As with SOPA and PIPA, ACTA takes a fairly bland idea – the right of companies to profit from their own intellectual property – and turns it into a governmental power grab, and an excuse to weaken privacy on the Internet. The reason the activists are turning their attention to ACTA, is that it provides the basis to criminalize almost any online activity. ACTA will give governments and, large corporations [SAME THING] the pretext to shut down any site and, imprison its owners, should there be political or corporate objections, to that site’s content.

Imagine a site, runs a political story, which is objectionable to someone in power.

The site perhaps can’t be shut down because of that story, but ACTA will allow the authorities to find some other obscure breach that can be used. That’s also true of SOPA and PIPA.

Watch this video which explains the danger of ACTA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsr16Yvk ... r_embedded

SOURCE: http://www.inquisitr.com/184832/acta-wo ... -and-bush/

Europe Rises Up Against ACTA

Widespread Protests Are Starting to Turn the Tide Against Anti-Democratic Bill

The widespread protests against the anti-democracy bill ACTA by the Polish people have forced Poland’s prime minister to stall – or perhaps even back out – of the treaty. As TechDirt notes:

Following the growing protests about ACTA in Europe, as well as signs of US meddling, Poland’s prime minister is making it clear that Poland will not ratify ACTA for the time being, leading to speculation that the EU may not actually join ACTA.

Read the full story: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/02/ ... -acta.html

We can convince the government to stand up to lobbyist pressure if we raise our voices together. Please send the government a message now.

A similar scheme in the US led to a huge public outcry forcing Big Media lobbyists to back off from their plan to impose the now-infamous SOPA and PIPA1 legislation.
Now, those lobbyists are turning to Canada through copyright legislation like Bill C-11 and trade agreements called ACTA2 and TPP3. Internet law expert Michael Geist recently revealed that behind-the-scenes Big Media lobbyists are pushing for powers such as website blocking4, Internet termination for people that threaten their business interests5, and huge threats for sites that host user-generated content (like YouTube)6, in addition to the “most restrictive digital lock provisions in the world,”7 which are already in Bill C-11.
Canadians are not taking this lying down. Across the country, online and off, Canadians are standing up against this Internet lockdown. Protests are being held in several cities today8; at the same time thousands of people are getting active online, using the Internet to say no to the Internet lockdown.

Let’s do our part today ..and make the Internet scream.

Politicians and policymakers have an opportunity to put Canada on the map as a leader in Internet openness and affordability. But they have to know that we’re behind them if they stand up to megacorporate lobbyists. Their approach is backwards: it suffocates online choice and it’s patently unfair.

Let’s kick up some dust. Tell the Prime Minister and the Industry Minister to say no to the Internet lockdown.

An onrush of condemnation and criticism kept the SOPA and PIPA acts from passing earlier this year, but US lawmakers have already authored another authoritarian bill that could give them free reign to creep the Web in the name of cybersecurity.

H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short), has been created under the guise of being a necessary implement in America’s war against cyberattacks. But the vague verbiage contained within the pages of the paper could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties. Critics have already come after CISPA for the capabilities that it will give to seemingly any federal entity that claims it is threatened by online interactions, but unlike the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Acts that were discarded on the Capitol Building floor after incredibly successful online campaigns to crush them, widespread recognition of what the latest would-be law will do has yet to surface to the same degree.

“We have a number of concerns with something like this bill that creates sort of a vast hole in the privacy law to allow government to receive these kinds of information,” explains Burman, who acknowledges that the bill, as written, allows the US government to involve itself into any online correspondence, current exemptions notwithstanding, if it believes there is reason to suspect cyber crime. As with other authoritarian attempts at censorship that have come through Congress in recent times, of course, the wording within the CISPA allows for the government to interpret the law in such a number of degrees that any online communication or interaction could be suspect and thus unknowingly monitored.

In a press release penned last month by the CDT, the group warned then that CISPA allows Internet Service Providers to “funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls.
Full story: http://rt.com/usa/news/cispa-bill-sopa-internet-175/