Users Have Been Betrayed in the Final TPP Deal
eff.org
eff.org
"... breaking a copyright protection system (i.e. DRM, TPM, etc.) would land you in hot water ... if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties. Traditionally, for many jurisdictions, circumventing DRM is typically reserved for civil penalties. Criminal penalties implies that the government would foot the bill for enforcement. In civil cases, it is typically rights holders that go after individuals.
... civil damages do apply. How much are civil damages if an alleged infringer is found guilty? Well, that is up to rights holders, not a judge. Prosecution is able to determine the damages and a judge would have to accept whatever number comes out regardless of evidence to the contrary. A good example might be that a song may be sold for 99 cents, but the damages sought could be in the millions for all the prosecutors are concerned.
... an act of copyright infringement as set forth in this “trade” agreement doesn’t actually have to occur before the authorities are sent after you. There just has to be evidence that infringement is taking place or is about to take place.
... if you have a cell phone, and you have something on it that could be considered infringing, authorities have the right to seize it because you are suspected of trafficking. Of course, you could also be liable for civil and criminal penalties as earlier outlined and could be fined any amount copyright holders feel like.
... you could be fined on the spot because of your cell phone on top of it all. No need for a judge here. Also, no, you may not get your cell phone back. It could be destroyed ... Who gets to pay for all of this? According to page 77, you do."
... if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties. Traditionally, for many jurisdictions, circumventing DRM is typically reserved for civil penalties. Criminal penalties implies that the government would foot the bill for enforcement. In civil cases, it is typically rights holders that go after individuals."
Except that here's the actual text:
> Each [7] Party [US/SG/MX/NZ/PE/JP/BN/AU/CL/MY propose: shall] [CA propose: may] provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied where any person is found to have engaged willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or financial gain in any of the above activities.
That doesn't sound like "if you need to circumvent a DRM for personal use, you are now liable for criminal penalties" to me.
The mere possibility of a criminal penalty POSSIBLY applying is a big move.
Personal, non-commercial circumvention of DRM is addressed in (i) below.
"(i) knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,[174] circumvents without authority or any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work,[175] performance, or phonogram;[176] or
(ii) manufactures, imports, distributes[177], offers for sale or rental to the public or otherwise provide devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:"
1. *Blah blah blah.* Blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah:
(a) blah blah blah; blah blah, blah blah blah where
(i) blah blah, or
(ii) blah blah blah, blah:
(A) blah,
(B) blah blah, or
(C) blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. *<< this is still part of subclause (1)(a)*
(b) Blah blah blah [...]
I appreciate that such documents are very confusing, even more so when they are in draft form and include multiple 'live' options (rather like improperly declared constants in programming), and more so again when they're presented as just a big wall of text without any typographic structuring that would make them easier to read. Parsing such complex documents is difficult; if it were easy then courts would be less busy than they are. But a great deal of the 'analysis' of the impending trade agreements (as well as other legal stuff that is sometimes posted to HN) seems to start with an assumption about meaning or purpose, and then go through the text looking for clues to back it up. This is a fast track to self-deception and eventual defeat in the event of a dispute.
I'm not a lawyer, just a law nerd.
Do you agree that the quoted text was in the scope of the "devices" (ii) branch rather than in the scope of the "circumvention" (i) branch?
http://keionline.org/sites/default/files/Section-G-Copyright...
Some attempts have been made at Finance DSLs, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23448/dsl-in-finance
(have degrees in software engineering & law, have during law school reviewed much of the existing literature in this field from several societies/journals, of which one of my professors was a prominent contributor; there has been much published on this type of stuff, and none of it is deemed (even by the people working on it) remotely feasible for implementation or actual use.)
Start searching e.g. by reading the publications of http://jurix.nl and the literature referenced therein; or google scholar'ing on 'legal ontologies' and going from there.
https://computationallegalstudies.com is the blog of law professor Dean Katz, and will probably be of considerable interest to you.
Human judgement turns out to be pretty important in deciding whether or not something is a crime. That judgement is influenced by argument, guided by precedent, and reviewable by higher authorities, but it is ultimately judgement. It's somewhere between very, very hard and impossible to write laws that catch the edge cases without ensnaring innocent people or being subject to human interpretation.
Those same definitions will be used several times. Could they be extracted out? Could we have something that we're able to turn into a series of questions that a lay person could have at least a crack at? I've seen some of those done for tax law in the UK and it really simplifies things (although these are made manually).
Basically, keep humans making those decisions of what is malicious or wilful, and have the law written in such a way as to allow (but not require) a computer to take and combine those decisions.
How effective is a measure if it was just circumvented 'without authority'?
I'm sure this is just one of many contradictions in the final document. I guess we'll get to see soon.
Any programmers in the negotiating committees perchance?
Well, you're screwed if you have ads on your site. Imagine, your site get's popular. You make lots of money from google ads. Ooops, you did it for financial gain. Try proving you didn't.
No, the person is not. Removing DRM does not infringe copyright. A jailbreak does not infringe copyright.
Let's hope we get them. Personally, I expect Reddit to be able to deliver the necessary attention and expertise to cover the issue thoroughly.
EDIT to downvoters: that was not meant as a joke. Reddit is usually orders of magnitude better information source than any media outlet. Just ignore the front page and look at a relevant subreddit.
Take a look at, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nl4sz/e... and tell me you've actually seen a better summary by a mainstream media outlet.
>The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement.
is just mind boggling if you are interested in classical music.
note: some of the early links to some YouTube links are dead but it is not hard to search for alternative given the information provided.
That was sarcasm, right?
- (an important point to start, because it's what many people are missing) ignore the frontpage, head for topical subreddits; pretty much any topic you could imagine has a moderated, HN-quality-like subreddit for it
- you can't really spin an agenda on Reddit; too many people from all sides participating -> bullshit is eventually identified as such
- like here, content on Reddit is created by people who care about the issue at hand, unlike media outlets which usually care about influence and advertising money
- unlike mainstream media outlets, Reddit users aren't under direct or indirect pressure from governments and corporations to spin the story in a particular way
- there are lots of actual experts on Reddit, from every occupation imaginable; so for instance on /r/spacex you'll find actual aerospace industry professionals, actual historians on /r/History, etc; they all participate in their free time and have no incentive, monetary or otherwise, to bullshit, nor their contributions are twisted by editorial staff to say whatever the outlet wants them to say like mainstream media does all the time
- whatever bullshit the mainstream media publishes, Reddit users will find and debunk (again, just like we do here on HN with tech/hard-science-related news)
- Reddit does even care about the form more; the main post on the TPP will likely have less typos than the main article in NYT
Anyway, what I expect to happen is that the discussions on TPP will quickly turn into a group organizing around a subreddit that will collect and summarize analyses of experts both from mainstream media and Reddit natives. Like usual, there will likely be a sticker post with a huge FAQ directing to detailed answers to all the questions you could possibly ask. All information in one place, throughly verified and free from bullshit.
TL;DR: people accusing me of being sarcastic are probably missing out on one of the few bullshit-free sources of information on the Internet.
EDIT or check out [3] on NSA leaks. Less discussions there, but find me a better place to find all the information about pretty much every single leak and surveillance-related story recently. Be sure to check out the sidebar - the list of posts is sortable by topics and there's also a Wiki.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1w4090/ukraine_r...
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1vuj6v/ukrainian_p...
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/live/3rgnbke2rai6hen7ciytwcxadi
My experience with Reddit has been that, like most other places on the Internet, it's a mixed bag.
Specifically, some of the moderators are authoritarian dicks (e.g. /r/technology) who evaluate rules without nuance and ban people for sharing a link even when given explicit permission by another moderator to share it.
Other subreddits are a bit better (e.g. /r/php), others are probably worse. My opinion of /r/netsec has changed frequently over the past few months.
That I will agree. It's a very mixed bag, the worst subreddits are utter crap, but the best ones are pretty much the best source of knowledge on the Internet. You have to find the ones you like, but fortunately it isn't hard :).
Personally, I still prefer HN as my primary procrastination target. On Reddit I usually hang out only on /r/KerbalSpaceProgram. However, I turn to Reddit whenever I need to research particular interests. Almost always there exists a high-quality subreddit for the topic I want to explore. I'm usually less interested in the on-going discussion then, and more in the accumulated knowledge.
For example, I actually went (successfully) on a diet with Reddit. When researching ways to lose weight I ended up browsing dieting subreddits, and eventually ended up on /r/keto. The ongoing discussion is, as you may suspect, mostly photos of people trying to lose weight mixed with topics covering minutiae of the ketogenic diet. The sidebar, however, is a trove of knowledge and experience that community has collected over the years. It linked me directly to books, research, experiences and best tips that helped me set up and execute my plan.
This is just farcially false. Reddit has good coverage in some areas and bad coverage in other areas. There are a few places where it's gives you the absolute best coverage but, as a counterexample, if Reddit was your only source for news you might think America's #1 problem was an epidemic of false-rape complaints.
Reddit is about where Wikipedia was 5 years in, a sometimes great resource and at the same time a constant punchline about not being a great resource. It has the potential to grow into something as useful or moreso but the jury is still out.
LOLOLOL
Because Reddit's reader/membership is obviously a balanced and unbiased sample of the world's population, right?
It doesn't matter, it's not like the peoples complaints will mean anything.
I’d argue that it’s implausible to claim that TPP could add more than a fraction of one percent to the incomes of the nations involved; even the 0.5 percent suggested by Petri et al looks high to me.
These gains aren’t nothing, but we’re not talking about a world-shaking deal here.
So why do some parties want this deal so much? Because as with many “trade” deals in recent years, the intellectual property aspects are more important than the trade aspects. Leaked documents suggest that the US is trying to get radically enhanced protection for patents and copyrights; this is largely about Hollywood and pharma rather than conventional exporters.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/tpp-at-the-nabe/
If pirating Beyoncé will put you in jail, more people will be willing to listen to all of the great free music on sites like bandcamp and soundcloud.
That's the major benefit to this legislation as I see it. Overpriced pop media garbage will become decreasingly popular in exchange for better but less-popular works. As recording and film companies see large swathes of the population leaving their works for independent producers, they'll lower their prices to try to stay relevant.
I say this even as a frequent media pirate -- this is not the end of the world, far from it. If this legislation has teeth, it will birth a new world of free creativity, of the people and for the people.
Edit: The same, I propose, will be true of opensource hardware.
My point is that the notion of buying songs and albums is coming to an end. I personally don't like it, but there you have it. And sorry to say it, but for this future in which we rent music, I also blame piracy. I also think ad-blockers will be the catalyst for a similarly dark future for websites.
The underlying cause is always people illegally using and not willing to pay for other people's work.
Um, how? Why not blame high-speed internet instead?
The Pirates will just develop a new technology to avoid detection, even making a Mesh Network off of the Internet that is a private network that stores pirated files and other stuff. You'd have to know someone to get access to this Mesh Network. But I imagine people in colleges will make their own Wifi Mesh Networks for students to use to share files and then extend the range to allow people near the college to share files as well.
People will invest in a Seedbox to download torrents for them and share access to it with their friends.
Much as I'd like to see independent artists get considered, most people still go for what is popular based on what they hear on the radio or in TV shows or movies.
Even if you cleared the device before it was taken into custody, they could still have a case if they can reasonably show that you cleared it with suspicion that it would be taken into custody. Obviously, that can be difficult to show, depending on the burden of proof required.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/forcing-suspects-...
(but they might just have you enter them yourself instead :/)
VeraCrypt (for example; previously TrueCrypt) allows for using separate passwords to access different data depending on which one was entered: one would be a dummy volume on which you would plant convincing data, and the other ("hidden") volume would contain your actual data. Since the encrypted data are indistinguishable (ideally!) from randomness, you have plausible deniability.
https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Plausible%20De...
Here we see property rights being strengthened to the point of undermining popular sovereignty! How can they be called rights when the stronger they are and the more aggressively they are enforced the more authoritarian the world feels?
As a corollary, get your music from people with no marketing budget. They'll be forced to charge what it actually costs.
One possible way it would work is that all drug development would be done by non-profits and government sponsored labs. Then drug R&D would be paid for directly by the people who want the drugs upfront and anyone could produce them. The final cost of drugs would be just a markup on the manufacturing cost.
The alternative is that people would not develop drugs, but I find it hard to believe that this would be the case.