Secret Anti-Piracy Treaty Turns ISPs into Pirates

Can you actually hold an ISP responsible for what their customers do? According to a leaked copy of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, that is what is being proposed right now behind closed doors.

Similarly, all participating countries have to adopt a ‘notice and takedown’ policy where copyright holders can request ISPs to remove infringing materials, again without having to provide solid evidence or proof that they actually own the copyrights. When ISPs don’t comply with the requests they will be held liable, which means that they will be seen as pirates themselves.

Sooner or later, the wall of "we are not responsible for what others do with our services" will come crashing down. Its going to vastly change the business landscape and a few big companies will probably get hurt bad or be fored out of business.

That wall is already starting to fall, this whole thing is due to the horrible laws covering the digital age, laws need to be re-written

Sell a person a legit hunting gun, then that person goes out and kills someone. Did the owner of the gun store commit murder? No.

This is just another one of those stupid e-laws that the copyright industry is trying to control the internet and violate everyone's privacy.

Uhhhhh? All I got to say to that.

Man, they are really going the wrong direction with this stuff.

Originally Posted by Kuromizu

Man, they are really going the wrong direction with this stuff.

and we elect the same people, year after year...

Next step, hold aircraft manufaturers and airlines responsible for 9/11

Hold gunmakers responsible for the columbine massacre
Hold car makers responsible for every car accident...

Originally Posted by Stoly

Next step, hold aircraft manufaturers and airlines responsible for 9/11

Hold gunmakers responsible for the columbine massacre
Hold car makers responsible for every car accident...

can we hold humans resonpible for genocide, and failing to stop it? Or is that an internal thing?

Here's how things work now.

It's simple.

In general people are poor as hell and most people who Pirate stuff are like not millionaires. So no company or organization wants to go after them because there is no return on investment.

But If they can some how pin the blame on a larger entity then they can get some money, and since corporations can go to jail everything will get settled with money.

We need a new social system and we won't/can't obtain a new social system by using our old one.

Sounds like privacy laws are getting in the way of going after individuals so they are netting for the easier target. This isn't reasonable and most certainly shouldn't be legal.

Originally Posted by Project_Nightmare

Sell a person a legit hunting gun, then that person goes out and kills someone. Did the owner of the gun store commit murder? No.

This is just another one of those stupid e-laws that the copyright industry is trying to control the internet and violate everyone's privacy.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like where this is going, but the analogy isn't quite right.

A more accurate version would be:
Police visit a gun store and show the owner a picture of someone and say "We think this guy may have unlawfully shot someone, but we've no proof" then the next day the guy in question comes in and the shopkeeper sells him a gun anyway. The day after that the Police return and say "We think the guy may have killed again, we still can't prove it but we're arresting you for accessory to murder"

Its still bullshit, just a different kind. Its not the act of issuing take-down notices that is necessarily wrong, just the fact it requires no proof. Copyright holders can (and do) make any bullshit claim they like and no ISP is gonna ignore them if it leaves them liable, and since they won't spend their own resources to prove infringement hasn't occurred, and will just fold as soon as they hear a complaint.

If these laws get through then we can suspect that a large money pile got distributed between the supporting representatives, because these laws aren't good for any country.

Or there will be loopholes so ISPs and others don't have to enforce/follow these rules most of the time.

none of this fixes the central problem:
-movies are easy to pirate
-they are late to release hulu/nbc etc free versions after pirates do
-they release lower quality online versions than pirates
-they use repetitive ads, maybe 1 ad 5x in 30 minutes
-they use out of date distribution methods (dvd instead of digital)
-they are not following what the public wants (cheaper digital distributions without middle man costs)

going on this... if you remove the middle man you would lower costs right? no shipping, no paying people at best buy to be retarded and put it on the display.. do they do this? no... they end up charging more or the same as a dvd for a Digital distribution.

so instead of fixing their market problems they will focus on $ and getting money from isps.

An analogy that I think is a bit closer is - A person uses their telephone to call in a death threat to the president. Who's responsible? The phone company for providing the service or the person who actually did it?

phone company duh... and the guy who did it so you can extort more money for a less quality product.

Actually, ISPs will become liable if they don't cut off the customers accused of file sharing, which is a more important, accurate point to bring up than "removing content"; they'll be expected to remove their customers from the internet. So this will be to the detriment of both The People and the ISPs.

With this line of thinking...

Should copyright holders be held responsible? If they never created the content, there would be no piracy.

It's no secret that recording and media industry lobbyists have been pushing for something like this for ages. What really angers me about this "secret" document is that Obama ran on the platform of transparency and this is just one of the numerous examples of anything but. Then again, shame on me for thinking anything other than, "politics as usual." =P

That said; I'll be really interested in hearing the reaction from the White House to this document.

This is another example of the new mentality of "Guilty until proven innocent." The copyright holders can make some random accusation with NO substantiation and all of a sudden you (or your ISP, if this is any indication) is 100% guilty of a civil or criminal violation and is held responsible.

Yet another reason copyright law needs some reform in the digital age. Government and especially MPAA/RIAA or foreign equivalents do not have the right to force ISPs to cut off or be responsible for customers without affirmative proof of wrongdoing. Just like you can't physically arrest someone without evidence or probable cause, citizens cannot be held responsible on suspicion alone. Sadly, these organizations are twisting the arm of ISPs and trying to make it so.