Posted on 02/13/2015 4:40:46 PM PST by lbryce
Go to Prison for Sharing Files? That’s What Hollywood Wants in the Secret TPP Deal
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains extreme DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.
Here, we’d like to explore yet another set of rules in TPP that will chill users’ rights. Those are the criminal enforcement provisions, which based upon the latest leak from May 2014 is still a contested and unresolved issue. It’s about whether users could be jailed or hit with debilitating fines over allegations of copyright infringement.
Dangerously Low Threshold of Criminality The US is pushing for a dangerously broad definition of a criminal violation of copyright, where even noncommercial activities could get people convicted of a crime. The leak also shows that Canada has opposed this definition. Canada supports language in which criminal remedies would only apply to cases where someone infringed explicitly for commercial purposes.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefreethoughtproject.com ...
“If I could make the rules, any corporation that does more than blah blah blah.”
If you could make the rules, there would be no property rights and everything would be owned by the “public”, whatever the hell that means.
“Why should the public pay to protect it for them?”
Tax payers pay, not “the public”. Most of “the public” now is in gubmint dole of one form or another.
And the tax payers tend to be property owners, so they are paying for their protection right out of their own pockets.
Let me rephrase it. Why should I as a taxpayer, have to pay for it?
Why should I as a taxpayer have to pay to protect your property and belongings ever?
I’m good with what the Founding Fathers left us.
Nice to hear you are as well.
L
Would you be willing to pay property taxes on it like I do?
Live and learn.
The elites protecting themselves again.
We need to shorten the copyright term. (And I speak as a copyright owner.)
We pay more taxes on our copyright earnings quarterly than most Americans earn in in a year - and way more than you pay on your real estate. Don't talk to me about taxes. Why don't you get off your ass and write some novels? Stay up all night for weeks at a time, when you're done try and sell them to an agency good enough to sell them to a publisher. Write one or two novels a year that way, losing sleep and missing your kids' school events in order to meet a deadline. Then sit back and listen to ignorant dumb-asses declare that you don't have a right to own the rights to intellectual property you created. Go ahead try that and get back to me.
Why? Because that is how science and the (useful) arts progress: people are free to build on the discoveries and previous artistic work of others. The Founders put a clause in the Constitution so that Congress could pass laws like the British copyright and patent laws we abandoned when we became independent, which the first Congress under the Constitution promptly did. They specified "to authors and inventors", and at the time that would have been understood to mean "not to publishers or manufacturers other than the author or inventor" because those were the abuses the British laws had corrected. Now most copyrights are held not by the actual author, but a publisher or estate, who, per your objection, didn't create the work either, because contrary to the plain meaning of the Constitutional provision for their creation, they have been reified as "property" that can be alienated from the author or inventor by the "transfer of copyright (or patent rights)."
The notion that an artistic creation should be locked up in the control of a publisher or artistic estate for decades after the death of the author, with control preventing not merely the reproduction of the work in question, but the creation of derivative works is an impediment to science and the arts, not a support -- the Constitutional purpose specified by the Founders was to promote science and art, not create a source of monopoly rents for commercial interests.
Why exactly should Robert Frost's (d. 1968) "Fire and Ice" (written 1928) be a source of monopoly rents for Henry Holt & Co., rather than something anyone can use as song lyrics or have a character in a novel quote in its entirety? Henry Holt & Co. didn't create it any more than the public did. But the public might use it to create new art. Henry Holt & Co. will only use it to harass artists into paying them royalites.
You realize that the Founders would not have considered either copyrights or patents to be “property”.
The reification of government granted monopolies as “intellectual property” which can be transferred or sold is actually contrary to the plain meaning of the Constitutional authority to grant them, which specifies “to authors and inventors”. Looking at the history of the British copyright and patent law that the Founders has in mind when they drafted the Constitution — we know they had it in mind because the First Congress under the Constitution copied it into American law — the specification was intended to be exclusive. “To authors and inventors” means not to publishers (the practice before the Law of Queen Anne, which the first American copyright law copied) and not to commercial interests other than the inventor (a common practice before the Statute on Monopolies limited letters patent to inventors, again copied into American law by the First Congress).
Look, I’m not against copywrite protections that are reasonable. They were set up as a deal in which both sides benefited. The holder was protected for a reasonable amount of time at the publics expense after which the public bebefited as it entered the public domain. Lifetime + 70 years is way beyond reasonable.
No. The notion that copyright and patents constituted "property" was unknown to the Founders. You are reading a late 19th century idea about their nature back to the American Founding.
The Founders plainly did not understand them to be property, since a short term followed by passage into the public domain (something that doesn't happen with property -- houses, furniture, paintings, coins,... don't pass to the public or revert to common in the Lockean sense simply by the passage of time) is what they put into law in the First Congress: for copyrights the same terms as the Law of Queen Anne, 14 years, renewable for another 14 at the request of the author, not the "rightsholder", not the author's estate, the author, period.
“Let me rephrase it. Why should I as a taxpayer, have to pay for it?”
The right to the due process of the law. Look it up, it’s in the constitution. Without the constitution, property owners could hunt down and shoot these thieves.
So, the tax money is used to ensure that the due process of the law is maintained.
Truth to that. There are a lot of hard-core control freaks that come out of the woodwork to back some of the most draconian laws. The hypocrisy of their beliefs escapes them because it is all about what they want and what is good for them personally.
“The notion that copyright and patents constituted ‘property’ was unknown to the Founders.”
I was not talking about nomenclature. You can say the constitutional “exclusive right” to inventions is not property, but in modern terminology, ownership is implied.
IP is not a direct extension of natural law in the way real property ownership is. It is somewhat of a social contract whereby we elect representatives who establish the applicable IP law and make treaties whereby inventions can be exploited in other nations as well.
Due process, or doo-doo process?
The constitutional intent is not primarily to protect private property in intellectual works (which can be indefinitely duplicated without costing the creator any additional labor) but to ensure the progress of the useful arts.
People who sit on their copyrights or patents should be excluded for that very reason. It should be use it or lose it. Because the primary intent with respect to such works is not private property.
It is well known some of the fiascos that have resulted from ham handed attempts to crack down on things that “might or might not have been” “thefts” of intellectual property. Do I want that in my name if I am an artist? From the point of view of ethics I am not sure how crude a sausage I want made in my name.
I observe that most people desire to be honest and will pay for something if it is easy enough to put the transaction through. It is large, impersonal companies that take the “let them eat cake” attitude.
People who hack systems for any reason, or create virus’s should be executed, no exceptions.
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