The involved governments have refused to disclose to their own citizenry the contents of the treaty they're negotiating "for us". That leaves us with only leaks to work with. This is all the accuracy you get, as long as our governments can get away with such gross abuses.
"We conclude that neither Avena nor the President’s Memorandum constitutes directly enforceable federal law that pre-empts state limitations on the filing of successive habeas petitions."
If they want this to become law in the US, they will have to follow the usual process. If they want criminal sanctions without trials, as the treaty proposes, the Constitution will have to be rewritten. (The fact that enforcing these laws will be technically impossible is another annoying issue.)
It doesn't matter what they negotiate, treaties do not become US law.
Your link does not support that claim. What the link says is that some treaties are self-executing. Those are automatically US law. Others are not self-executing, and require legislation to be passed. The ruling is that the Vienna convention is not self-executing, and therefore needs legislation to come into effect.
Whether this particular copyright treaty would be self-executing depends on a court ruling on the details of the treaty. Given that lawyers are involved in drawing it up, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them design it to be self-executing in the USA. As for the Constitution, I'm so used to seeing attempted and actual end runs around it that I wouldn't be confident that it will stop them from enacting the copyright rules they want.
You're wrong- treaties are not only law, but they trump the constitution. Your link involves a technicality in a particular treaty, not treaties in general.
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land" is the usual money quote.
"Trump" usually has the meaning of supersede. I think the GP quote makes it clear ratified treaties supersede other provisions of the constitution - "shall be the supreme Law of the Land" seems pretty clear.
According to a Freedom House report (http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=463), only about 50-60 countries can be classified as "democratic" or "free", so I think saying "many" countries instead of "most" would be more appropriate.
Really, the only way I know how to make a living is online. This would definitely change things.
But the more I think of it, I believe we'll be alright. Those in the web space have a certain scrappiness to them. I've always disliked rules and bureaucracy. That's why I'm here, and not in a Fortune 500 or jerking off politicians.
I find a way to scoot around bullshit rules now, and I'll scoot around them if this is passed.
Most people I know and work with have one thing in common: their job is to make disruptive technology that people love. Rules or no rules, nothing can stop them, as long as they have the best interest of the user in mind.
If they want this to become law in the US, they will have to follow the usual process. If they want criminal sanctions without trials, as the treaty proposes, the Constitution will have to be rewritten.
Anyone with a 6th grade reading level can see this is true. However, the courts apparently don't have this degree of understanding.
See, for example, the SCOTUS decision in US v Emerson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Emerson ). This case involved the so-called "Lautenberg Amendment", which forever denies access to firearms to anyone who has been the target of a restraining order in a domestic dispute. You'll note that such a restraining order does not involve any sort of due process. Nonetheless, the Court ruled that Dr. Emerson was not deprived of his 2nd Amendment rights.
Yes, but it's a lot easier to pass the "WTO 2009 Compliance Act" than the "Copyright Act of 2009". For starters, they'd bundle the copyright stuff with a pile of other trade stuff, and it'd be cast as "fulfilling our trade obligations", not "giving crazy rights to Disney and friends".
The government no longer works for its citizens. It is a completely separate organization from whatever the citizens create. Their laws do not apply unless they use force. Simple as that.
I'm going to just install FreeNet now and setup some encryption software now...
Gross abuses? Because its being written in secret? The US Constitution itself was written in secret! That fact alone does not make this a bad thing- but it is certainly something to be concerned about- and I'm certainly very concerned about the alleged contents of this treaty. We can only hope that once it becomes public, Congress will be convinced by public outcry not to ratify it.
starting a new country is in a completely different category.
i'd agree with "gross abuses" since this is a treaty being crafted in secret, with special "access" given to certain interested parties... basically the government isn't working for the good of the people, but for the good of a few large companies and the detriment of the people.
these are the people that thought the CD would destroy their business. then they thought the DVD would destroy their business. these are the people that want you to pay every single time you watch a movie that you own. they fill the airwaves with Creed and Linkin Park. they don't understand technology in the least. fire probably scares them. and they will be the ones "updating" our copyright law.
Because the Founders were concerned that if early drafts were circulated they would be shut down before they got very far- and they wanted to be able to change their minds freely without looking like they were flip flopping. Yes- those same circumstances clearly apply to politics today!
The situation that applies today is the treaty is being negotiated in secret in order to ratified in as much secrecy as possible and with the hope that once that's done, it can enforced as quietly as possible and the repressive parts of it may be used to make that silence mandatory as well.
-- Contrast this to the US constitution, which involved long and difficult demand before ratification.
I have strong doubts this could ever be implemented, simply because reality works against it.
Sure, they can try and criminalize half of the internet in one fellow swoop - but that won't change how we do things. There would be a few lawsuits thrown out by sane judges and that's it.
We can't, but the fact that they're keeping it secret strongly suggests to me that there's some very nasty stuff in it.
As I usually point out on these occasions, one way to stop these anti-freedom laws is to organise politically -- you can find your national Pirate Party at http://www.pp-international.net/
The free internet will only die if people are too lazy and apathetic to fight for it.
The Pirate Party already has two representatives in the European Parliament, and we've only been in existance since 2006. If we continue to fight, and if people who care abt these issues join us, we'll win. I fully expect that by 2020-2025, the Pirate Party's core beliefs will be the received wisdom throughout the developed world.
I think there are a lot of other big threats to startup businesses. Not all startup businesses depend on user generated content. Startups that make software or other products that aren't used and/or contributed to by essentially anonymous internet users don't have much to fear from this.
On the contrary, there are lots of startup businesses on the content creation side of the equation that could benefit from this legislation due to the increased risk and difficulty of pirating and distributing copyrighted works.
I create original art. When I have to work on distributing, I'm hampered by copyright law. I don't benefit from it. It harms me. Directly.
I've seen artists have their work infringed by others working for large corporations, and their ability to have something done about it quashed by a corporation wielding copyright law (see, for example, Timbaland vs. tempest)
Addendum: it looks like someone (someones?) is going around in this thread blanketing it in votes in favor of stricter copyright. Slightly creepy.
Well it required quite a bit of internet support and hostile publicity for the case to move one bit. Which goes on to prove that the copyright laws by themselves weren't providing protection for Tempest.
It's hard to justify the right for people to break copyright law.
At the same time, I can see how startups that are depending on the safe harbor clause to host copyrighted material to attract users would be upset with the rules of the game changing.
The concern I see being voiced is less about protecting copyright, for which many protections already exist, and more about implementing a level of regulation/protectionism that is out of step with what is usually just a civil complaint. True, criminal penalties do exist in US for certain instances of willful copyright infringement, but it is still overwhelmingly an area where there must be a plaintiff for any litigation to occur.
It is appropriate to treat copyright infringement in the same way one treats the international opium trade?
It is appropriate to treat copyright infringement in the same way one treats the international opium trade?
yeah, if you are:
the RIAA or MPAA
a news organization that doesn't want anyone blogging about the truthiness of your reporting
a politician receiving money from these groups
a politician wanting to censor certain information
i don't like that you merely have to be accused of infringement for bad things to happen. it'd be like getting accused of being a communist in the '50s. this feels like a big step towards global authoritarianism.
That's because it is a big step towards global authoritarianism. My wife is Hungarian, born in 1966 like myself, and she's deathly afraid of expressing political dissent in public venues like the Internet. That's what we're proposing to make the law now - that fear. Makes it ever so much easier to keep control, you see.
It is very hard for Americans to comprehend the idea of blatant oppression by the government as Americas always had a gentler approach to oppressing it's citizenry. I have quite a few friends from eastern European origin and it is always peculiar when you get into a discussion about the government with them and their voice immediately drops into whisper. After all of these years thy still have it in the back of their mind that someone from the party could be listening. Pretty creepy stuff if you stop to think about it.
Well, I have a story about that, from 2005. We were in Hungary (oddly enough) and were watching a show in which you could SMS in stuff from your phone and it would scroll across the screen, and some of it was political in nature.
My then-12-year-old daughter said, "So I could say, 'Bush is an idiot' and it would show up on the screen?" (Yeah, my politics is always pretty obvious.)
I laughed and said, "Sure could!"
She thought it over and said, "But would my name be on it? Maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."
I realized at that point that it was safer to express political dissent at that time in freaking Hungary than in the United States of America, and that my daughter knew that. Talk about a blow-your-mind situation.
My wife will talk anybody's ear off about politics face-to-face, and she has entirely radical opinions for our venue of Indiana. But if it's on the record? No way. She says we just don't need that kind of trouble.
I've been going down this list, voting up things that seem interesting. And suddenly I thought "Bloody hell, I'm using my real name to criticise the government on the internet". And obviously, I've decided that I have no problem with that. But I'm a white, middle class, middle aged businessman, and a British subject rather than an American citizen. And I still thought it.
America's stupid "War on Drugs" has devastated large parts of the world. Is an equally stupid, and, more laughably, even more doomed to failure "War on Copyright" going to wreck the Internet and possibly freedom itself?
And this is Obama? Who was supposed to be the good guy?
Many sectors of the law have been this way for awhile. It only takes an anonymous accusation for the FBI or DEA to raid your house, destroy it, seize your possessions, and never return them. You may only spend a few nights in jail but you'll never get your stuff back.
People have already been conditioned to accept this stuff as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
very true.
and lets not forget they have incentive to act of any accusation since they get to seize a bunch of property and fund their department... i've heard that police departments in some places send the swat team for everything since they can seize whatever they want.
I think it is more along the lines of people being afraid that their users might break copyright law.
For instance: my website allows users to upload profile pictures. From the sound of this, if one of them were to upload a copyrighted picture, _I_ am liable. My website is small right now, so monitoring this is feasible...if it gets much larger, I would need to hire a team of people just to police it.
Obviously, if somebody says "Hey, Ryan, user $foo has uloaded picture $bar, would you mind taking it down?" I will, but if this is the way boingboing is making it sound...it won't be that easy.
The threat is not that startups wouldn't be able to infringe copyright law. The threat is that startups would have to carry the burden of policing copyright law.
The cost of doing that may be prohibitive, and the vulnerability to frivolous claims by bigger competitors would mean that any startup dealing with user generated content would have to employ lawyers at all times.
If phone companies were liable for crimes coordinated over their networks, telephony would not exist.
Just as a data point -- it is an inalienable human right, at least as defined by the UN.
Article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights:
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
(Not that this by any means justifies or demands anything like the copyright regime we have now, let alone this ridiculous power-grab extension of it. And people are of course free to waive their rights at any time.)
The UN Declaration of Human Rights is a horrible document. It convolutes Negative and Positive Rights, and this is just a ridiculous one. How does a right like this work? If I write a book do I get royalties and exclusive rights to it forever? If I discover a new scientific law should I get royalties for anything invention that uses it forever? It just doesn't make sense, the sooner we get rid of copyright and to a large extent patents the better the world will be.
The UN is doomed to failure because of its twin, conflicting, missions.
On one hand, it aims to safeguard the freedom and dignity of people throughout the world. Doing so sometimes requires using force against oppressive governments.
Yet on the other hand, the UN seeks to protect the sovereignty of the world's nations. How can it protect the sovereignty of a nation against whom it is fighting due to its other mission?
When its soul is built on two mutually contradictory ideals, it can never be anything but a schizophrenic wreck with at least one of those ideals (and more likely, both of them).
Agreed, I have many problems with the UN. I think that it should be broken up into two main bodies.
1. All the traditional non profit work: WHO, UNICEF, etc -- focus on that and leave the politics out.
2. Political function -- it votes on nothing, and merely serves a forum for countries to discuss issues; all treaties are then signed between those countries the UN is not involved.
"should I get royalties for anything invention that uses it forever?"
It says your interests are entitled some protection, but doesn't specify method or compensation.
I find it rather disturbing when someone wants to throw away the UN Declaration of Human Rights because it protects some interests that are against yours.
I want to throw it out, because I don't believe it matters. I think it is a bad document, and it all it does is cheapen the notion of human rights. Of course I agree that some of the rights it outlines are correct, but the document on the whole is a mess.
Here are some examples:
Article 23, Article 24, Article 25, Article 26, Article 27, Article 30.
I think it's goals are good, I think they overreached.
Actually, the right to privacy isn't entirely guaranteed (nor is it a law; it is however, generally guaranteed by law). Your right to privacy can easily be suspended if there is reasonable suspicion that you committed a crime, for example, so that a search for evidence can take place.
As a later commenter said, the real point is that the human rights as declared in 1948 were no different (in form and style) to the treaty under discussion here. It was a group of countries getting together to decide the standards in which governments agree to treat their citizens- and each other.
It should also be noted that many of the articles there are broken or ignored- and this treaty seems to ignore Article 6: "Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." which would be suspended given some of the leaked terms.
The second amendment falsifies this statement. The only reason our opinions are irrelevant, is because of complacency and the inevitable slide towards tyranny that every world power faces as it ages. The government feels no threat from the people and therefore feels comfortable in selling our freedoms to the highest bidder. If the populous where not so complacent or indoctrinated then our leaders would think twice before leveraging our rights against us. This is a simple concept that the founding fathers understood all to well. They knew the constitution was a piece of paper and that individuals in the government would always look at it as such.
complacency and the inevitable slide towards tyranny
Look, I just don't agree with you that we are inevitably sliding towards tyranny.
If you struggled like I do to consider that the Man could organise His way out of a paper bag, let alone subjugate us all with tyranny, you might chill out on some of these issues.
Not every battle is worth fighting to the steps of Capitol Hill for, and well, in my opinion this Copyright stuff will get sorted out okay. There are big players on both sides of the argument. I cannot imagine Google being too happy about this Treaty.
>Look, I just don't agree with you that we are inevitably sliding towards tyranny.
You may not, but history repeats itself and human history is filled with a lot more tyranny than gilded ages. Hell we are only 200 years out of it now. Rome who we modeled ourselves after slid into it and imploded. So all historical relevance leads one to logically consider that it is a slightly higher than average possibility that we will repeat the cycle of history. Did we do so much better this time?
>If you struggled like I do to consider that the Man could organize His way out of a paper bag, let alone subjugate us all with tyranny.
It's happening all around the globe as we speak. It does not take much effort to find tyranny everywhere you look. Just because the 1st world has grown comfortable and detached does not mean that the 3rd world does not still experience it. Many times from 1st world people that are propping up the tyrants.
>Not every battle is worth fighting to the steps of Capitol Hill
Yes it is this is how tyranny works, the slow erosion of rights. One of the greatest quotes ever penned was by Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller in which he said:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
This was in response to the Nazi's tyrannical rule of Germany.
The point being, slow erosion of rights and targeting of other groups is the modus operandi of oppression. It has to be checked at every advance or it becomes that much more difficult to resist.
Have you ever noticed that not one President has ever repealed any powers gained by the executive branch and many times oversteps the allotted powers they are given. Make no mistake about it absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It is human nature, the founding fathers new it and tried to set up a system that would leave it in check. Unfortunately, with the erosion of the state governments and militias as a counterweight and the devastation that Europe felt in 1 and 2 it left the US executive branch with the legislative branch as it's only opposition and much like the senate of Rome we can see how well that counterweight worked.
So you can not agree, but you are disagreeing with a lot of historical evidence to the contrary and are pinning your hopes on the fact that this time above all the rest we got it right.
Me I will remain a paranoid whack job like the founding fathers where and the Jews of Germany where and like the Taiwanese are today.
This is an excellent comment, and you are correct that we forget too quickly the abuses of the past. Like Socrates' Apology.
I am reminded of the post a while ago regarding a man whose family was hounded out of their home at gunpoint by the Feds, and their lives systematically destroyed until he was forced to move out of the country, because one of the companies buying hosting from the host he had founded was found doing fraudulent business.
If we're lucky, we'll die before the countries we love turn to tyranny. Will our children? Will our grandchildren?
>If we're lucky, we'll die before the countries we love turn to tyranny. Will our children? Will our grandchildren?
I understand the sentiment, but when I look into the face of my son. I hope every day that if it should ever come to armed resistance that it comes to pass in my time and not his. I am a pacifist above all else, but I would rather have the moral obligation and the wages of war payed by my hand rather than that of my namesake.
He did not create this mess and it weighs on my mind that this is the legacy that I will leave him. We should all be ashamed of the legacy we are leaving to our children and if our legacy to them is tyranny, oppression and struggle then may we all be damned.
But 27.1 says:
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Which is directly in opposition to copyright. UDHR seems to stand on the fence on this issue.
Really? I have read many great books that where never in any way protected by copyright. Honestly, writers are compensated for around 30-40% of the content I read and the only advantage I see is a slightly higher quality of copy editing.
On a more serious note, for profit content is less innovative because it's targeting the widest audience possible. Walking around a book store you can find a lot of bland tasteless garbage to fit even the most snobbish pallet. But, there are other approaches. Wikipedia is a perfect example of what happens when you separate the content creation process from direct monetary gain as is Hacker News and a thousand other places that you never really think about.
PS: I don't care one way or the other, but suggesting that copyright is vital for innovation and creativity is just silly.
suggesting that copyright is vital for innovation and
creativity is just silly
You realise there are no CC licenses without copyright. That anyone can take my published work and reprint it as their own without any attribution.
Copyright has been much abused by big business, but that's capitalism at work, we shouldn't disavow people of the rights to an interest in the results of their labour.
Copyright only works as a contract between creators and the public. We're doing our part by protecting rights of content creators via the treaties and laws but we are being denied our part of the contract - having works enter the public domain in a timely fashion.
"You realise there are no CC licenses without copyright. That anyone can take my published work and reprint it as their own without any attribution."
That's the natural state of things. Changing the social relationship between artist and fan, unilaterally for a whole society as copyright has done, better have some darn good reasons. I am not convinced it's worthwhile.
Well historically copyright was created (Statute of Anne) to empower authors to retain rights of reproduction for a limited period so that they could profit from their work over and above any profits made by mere printers. Prior to that works remained hidden from the public domain or were bought by publishers outright who agreed amongst themselves not to interfere with one anothers monopoly right to reproduce the work - this was largely a technological restriction, there was [virtually, save transcription] no self-publication.
I still believe that encouraging people to create works by ensuring they have a limited monopoly on commercial exploitation in return for eventual expansion of the public domain is worthy and workable.
If you create a communist society then I can see how copyright is not needed, in the current climate of commerce where I am in Europe (at least) complete dissolution of copyright IMO is to the public detriment.
One simple example might be how to finance a proper dictionary, or indeed any academically rigorous reference work, without allowing the creators of the work the chance to profit from it? How would that work, in say a capitalist society, under your regime?
If no one wants a dictionary, then no one will pay for it to be written. That's the same now as under my regime. My idea is, if someone wants a dictionary, they would either write one or pay someone to write one. It's still pretty capitalistic. The same people pay for it, there's just more haggling and risk involved.
The first copy I sell as the commissioner of the dictionary could be the last - an alternative printer can buy that copy and produce a far-far cheaper copy (no production costs except blind reproduction). He will have the market and I will have nothing but bankruptcy.
How many people will pay a few million dollars for a dictionary to be made and then allow copies to anyone else? Copies will be sold with contracts for very high prices and with no chance of entering the public domain except by breach of contract.
The "capitalism at work" part is the manipulation of copyright to prevent works from entering the public domain. The motive is corporate profit: ensuring those with property retain it and any worth it can generate despite a socialist contract agreeing to give up that property after a certain period.
That is not "capitalism at work", that is rent seeking and one of the many very common forms of government failure.
Just because the motive of something is profit, it doesn't mean it is capitalism, the motive of taxes is also profit (for special interests), but that doesn't mean they are capitalism at work.
The stated motive of taxes is usually the public good; if it's profit for special interests then you're probably talking of fraud.
I still contend that the pressure by corporations to increase copyright terms in order to maximise the profitability of held IP assets is "capitalism at work". It is sustained holding of IP away from the public domain preventing others from using that IP [for profitable production]. Smells like capitalism to me.
How can we tell if it's accurate?