The reason that ACTA was negotiated in secret among rich countries was that this was seen as the most expeditious way of getting a super-extreme copyright agreement passed with a minimum of fuss, and that all the poor countries who were excluded from the negotiation would later be coerced into agreeing to it.
Read more »How shall the artists get paid?
One of the most common questions I get, and quite likely the most irrelevant, is “how shall the artists get paid?” in a scenario where the copyright monopoly is scaled back to sensible levels. But it makes no sense to ask that of a politician, for two primary and two secondary reasons.
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Son Of ACTA (But Worse): Meet TPP, The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
Given the mounds of evidence suggesting that over protection via such laws is damaging to the economy, this is immensely troubling, and once again shows how the USTR is making policy by ignoring data. This is scary.
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ACTA: An Outdated Agreement That Must Be Rejected
ACTA's bias and lack of legitimacy should compel the legislative bodies of the negotiating countries to strongly oppose its ratification and acknowledge the necessity to reform patent and copyright law.
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Could Free Software Exist Without Copyright?
GNU GPL actually *depends* on copyright, an intellectual monopoly, in order to spread intellectual freedom. Moreover, it seems to doom free software into a kind of symbiosis with copyright, forcing it to remain a supporter of that monopoly, since without it, the approach used to make the GPL so powerful would not work.
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Alvaro asks 9 questions to the Commission about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency
Alexander Alvaro (ALDE) has asked 9 questions about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency, or the access by the INTA committee to the drafts documents. He is also asking about changes to substantive patent law (read software patents here).
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More Countries React To ACTA; Brazil Says ACTA Is Illegitimate
A Brazilian official said that the agreement was not legitimate, negotiated by a closed group without considering all of the issues at play.
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"Final" Version of ACTA Must be Rejected as a Whole
By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves.
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Irish ISP wins major legal victory against record labels
UPC, one of Ireland's largest internet service providers, has won a major legal victory against four of the world's most powerful record companies over the much-contested issue of online music piracy.
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Piracy and Free Software
This essay is a summary of my presentation at the workshop Inlaws and Outlaws, held on August 19-20, 2010 in Split, Croatia. The workshop brought together advocates of piracy with participants in the free culture and free software movements.
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Near-Final ACTA Text is a Counterfeit of Democracy
The release of this text should not give the illusion of transparency by hiding the fact that the whole negotiation process was carried on out of public scrutiny. Moreover, ACTA could profoundly alter the Internet ecosystem by turning technical intermediaries into a copyright police of the Net.
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UK ISPs To Pay 25% of Copyright Enforcement Costs
"The UK's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has released a report (PDF) related to the new Digital Economy Act." Sounds exactly like the good old MAFIAA racket.
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Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits
These trolls are threatening the future of all aggregation sites. Every article will have to be checked before posting to insure that they don't secretly hold a copyright.
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ACTA Action: Call on Obama to end the secrecy, reject the treaty
The US government still hasn't gotten the message. President Obama and his administration are blocking release of the full text of ACTA. They don't want the public to know what the negotiators are up to, because they know we wouldn't stand for it.
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Medieval Copy Protection
Sometimes people come to me and ask, "How did medieval filmmakers protect their DVDs from piracy?" And I tell them that since so few households had DVD players during the thousand or so years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance that it really never became much of an issue.
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