Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

Like I mentioned in the other thread on the TPP Leak, the TPP could immediately have the following effects, if it is enacted into law by the participating nations. I picked the ones you would most likely notice:

1. 3-strikes laws in all participating nations. Note that the US and France have already effectively abandoned their attempted three-strikes laws [1] [2] [3], but would likely reinstate them.

2. dvdcss and UEFI Secure Boot circumvention (including shim loaders) will become illegal in enough countries to have chilling effects on open source innovation

3. significant extension of patents for medication, increasing healthcare costs

4. additional regulation of internet backbone providers – to perform deep packet inspection for government investigation of copyright infringement. This would use taxpayer dollars to enforce dying copyright regimes. I assume governments would be delighted to have justification to tap the internet at backbones.

5. End of works entering the public domain. Copyright term extensions are likely just as the US has done, so the public domain may not see new additions for a long time.

I want to mention the significant curtailing of fair use in Europe, which would train young artists not to remix or reuse others' ideas. However, it might take up to 5 years to feel the effects.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/france-defangs-it... (I'm citing Ars here mainly because they follow copyright law pretty closely. Please use google for other sources.)

[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/heres-what-an-act...

[3] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/major-isps-agree-...

And keep in mind the people giving money, respect, and utilization to Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Youtube, Xbox, Steam, etc are helping to support this continued insanity. These type of services are not the Internet future - they're the past reincarnated to deliver over IP.

What alternative way of distribution are you proposing? What do you think is the future?

Movie production financed by self righteousness.

Service where you can purchase and download high-quality non-drm products, videos, songs, like bandcamp.com. Is that so hard to comprehend?

I have to ask; are there fair use laws in Europe? I was always under the impression that was a US law.

Yes, more or less, but they are generally not as generous as the US.

E.g., the UK equivalent of fair use, "fair dealing", is limited to a definitive list of circumscribed purposes of the unauthorised use of copyright material, e.g., in writing a review. By contrast, US law has a non-exclusive set of tests to check if an unauthorised use is fair use, of which purpose is just one factor to be weighed in the balance.

I gather that Germany does not have any fair use law [1], but in practice a regime similar to the UK's has been established through several precedents in the German courts. France seems to be in a similar situation, with a more generous court interpretation of fair use [2].

Wikipedia tells me that Israel has a fair use law similar to the US; cf. [3].

[1]: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2013/08/8-... - note that vog's comment below seems to refute this source

[2]: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2011/01/who-said-france-d...

[3]: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2008/01/israel%E2%80%99s-...

While Germany may not have an exact equivalent of "fair" use, it does have something similar, in the law. It is named "Schranken des Urheberrechts" (limitation of copyright law), which you can find in §§ 44a to 63a (e.g. [1] and [2]). Part of it is the famous (at least in Germany) "Privatkopie" (private copy) which allows for copying material for private use. [3]

[1] http://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/44a.html

[2] http://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/63a.html

[3] However, you are not alloweed to break an effective copy protection on that way ... which is kind of contradictory, becase if lots of people manage to create those copies privately, that "copy protection" mechanism wasn't really "effective", was it?

In English (not sure about the quality of the translation and if it contains the latest amendments to the law):

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urh...

Yes, but under different names.

Sweden for example has the Right to quote law.

I just realised something; why would this agreement curtail European fair use equivalent laws? I thought it was Trans-Pacific agreement, specifically leaving out Europe.

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