TheAgitator.com
“Bad. Very Bad.”
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009Cory Doctorow summarizes leaked portions of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international copyright treaty that the last two U.S. administrations have ridiculously classified from public view as a matter of national security. I mean, unless you happen to be an executive or lobbyist for one of the corporations who are essentially writing the terms of the agreement.
And man. This thing looks terrifying.
Ah the rug of national security….is there anything that can’t be swept under you?
It really is the worst of of nation policies, and the most easily used to fuck the pubilc.
The internet is the most powerful communications tool ever invented by several orders of magnitude. It is, in fact, so powerful that it has the potential to unite virtually the entire population of a country, if not the world, against government almost over night.
That’s just not a weapon government can leave intact for public use. They have to gut it without seeming to be infringing on free speech rights. So, who better to partner with than the powerful entertainment lobby who has already been on a crusade to radically restrict what can and can’t be transmitted between users on the internet.
Oh, yeah. In a way, the agreement (and keeping it secret) is about national security in the sense that government feels threatened by the internet. They want this to pass with as little fanfare as possible because they know the public could raise a shit storm which could potentially doom it before it’s finalized.
Copyright law is now a national security concern? Really? Insert obligatory Pete Townsend lyrics here.
Remember, remember the 5th of November…
TV was never a free medium. The internet, until now, was.
What will start true civil unrest? I hope this.
Stopping the internet is like stopping the wind from blowing. You can put up a few walls here and there, but even mountains get worn down eventually.
Will I be able to accuse every US Government office, politician, and official of copyright infringement and thus subject to the full force of all the nasty retarded penalties? If so, I guess I have my plan of action.
I’m about the most computer illiterate person you’ll ever meet, so I don’t understand any of this. This (below) was on the ustr.gov Web site. Has anybody read through it?
Negotiations on the ACTA began in June 2008. In preparation for those negotiations and since then USTR has reached out to the public for its views and to exchange information on several occasions. The release today of a summary of the ACTA is the most comprehensive joint effort to date of all of the participants in the negotiation to provide information on the ACTA to the public. The summary can be found on the USTR website at http://www.ustr.gov. Members of the public with questions about the summary or the status of the negotiations should contact Kira Alvarez, Chief Negotiator and Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Intellectual Property Enforcement at (202) 395-4510.
When I was a kid we had something we called, “The Twentieth Century”. Some of you may have heard of it. Collectivism in all its grotesque forms murdered millions, tens of millions, *hundreds* of millions, and over and over again the cry went up; “Never again!”. And then it happened again.
Take a look out your window and witness the unrelenting march towards global totalitarianism under the guise of ‘climate change’, or ‘economic stability’ or a hundred other threadbare excuses, and observe the destruction attendant, the barren wastelands created, the lives destroyed.
Perhaps my negative view stems from living in the fetid ‘democratic’ pit that is Eastern Massachusetts, but in all the years of sharing URLs and print-outs, books and arguments, I’ve not seen that long-hoped-for groundswell of understanding and a yearning for freedom; instead I see a world awash in a quadrillion dollars worth of vaporous ‘derivatives’, trillion-plus dollar deficits, ghost towns the size of Boston growing in Detroit,… and the parade of stupidity continues unabated in a million different ways.
Beck recently pointed to John Venlet’s lament about the futility of shooting sparrows, which I had beat by a decade.
It’s going to get weirder, kids. When C-Span finally zooms in on the zipper tab under the flap of skin at the base of Hillary’s neck, that’s when the fun begins. You watch and see.
This:
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:TkHfC2W8_FEJ:www.keionline.org/node/660+%22Kira+Alvarez,+Chief+Negotiator+and+Deputy+Assistant+U.S.+Trade+Representative+for+Intellectual+Property+Enforcement%22+at+(202)+395-4510&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
seems a lot more interesting. (I don’t know if you need all that — maybe just keionline.org) I still don’t get it, but it does seem worth looking at. If you put “Kira Alvarez, Chief Negotiator and Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Intellectual Property Enforcement at (202) 395-4510″ into a search engine, you get some really interesting results.