I won't quite agree with his band's title of their song "This is the End," but, I am a little frightened. I read a Tweet today from the drummer of Relient K, Ethan Luck, who had posted a link with the text "Well, that's just great..." Being as I only go on Twitter to kill time because I have run out of resources to creep on Facebook, I naturally clicked the link. What I found was slightly horrifying.
"What was it" you ask? Did I get a link telling me about the end of the world? Did God's gift to football (according to the media) Brett Favre get into an accident? Is U2 coming out with another album?!! No. Worse.
The link brought me to an article from boingboing.net. Apparently, the internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a SECRET copyright treaty who Obama's administration has kept under wraps for 'national security' reasons has been leaked.
What does this all mean? Well, basically, it spoke of four things:
1) ISPs will have to constantly police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger will be impossible to run because there is no way they could afford to hire enough lawyers to determine whether every piece of content put online is infringing on copyright. (Oh no, Zack. This means we can't read your super awesome blog.)
2) ISPs will have to cut off internet access to those accused of copyright infringement without access to a trial or counsel or they could be held accountable. This means that basically your whole household could be cut off from the internet if your little 13 year-old sister decided to illegally uploaded some copyrighted material of the Jonas Brothers to YouTube. What happens if both of the parents work online and don't forget about use of internet banking and whatnot.
3) The whole world must adopt US-style "notice and takedown" rules. This means that anything that someone flags of breaking copyright rules will be taken down without evidence or trial. As you can imagine, people could take advantage of this as easy censorship. (I am already thinking about all the terrible band's music videos I would consider flagging.)
4) Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM. The example from boingboing that they used was "e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival presentation; because you own copyrighted work that is locked up in DRM."
Now, not having too much information on the subject I wouldn't say this is law yet. I would assume this is merely what they are thinking of. Personally, I think these rules would put too much responsibility on ISPs. I also think that some of these copyright rules are dumb. It is the internet, stuff is going to get stolen. What do you think? Does the idea of them cracking down on these rules make you shiver in your computer chair or would you have no problem with them?
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Zack,
ReplyDeleteI hate stuff like this. I understand that copyright is wrong, but like you said, it is unrealistic to think that they will be able to crackdown and catch every person that breaks copyright law. I especially don’t like the third thing you listed, “The whole world must adopt US-style "notice and takedown" rules.” How can Obama expect the world to follow the laws of his country? You don’t own the world Obama, calm down. I think it’s ridiculous. Just because you want to follow a rule, does not mean that the rest of the world does. This article doesn’t necessarily make me feel scared, but I still don’t like it. I like to blog and I try to do it correctly. However, sometimes I worry that I'm not doing it completely right.
Oh no Zack. This This means we can't read your super awesome blog! I'm with both you and Alyssa in the post above. Infringing on copyrighted material is WRONG but there is simply no way they could expect this to be enforced. How many people would need to be hired to police every corner of the internet. Larger ISPs would have the most trouble with this because they could be providing service to possibly hundreds of thousands of customers. It's not feasible to assume that these companies can hire additional work especially with the economy in its current state.
ReplyDeleteI can’t even begin to imagine how they would begin to get a handle on all that and control it. They will get so much horrible feed back when someone’s real site and information is taken down because a competitor or just simply someone doesn’t like them. It seems that 2012 has come to the internet world before the real world! I really can’t see this actually coming into effect or maybe that’s just because I am hoping so much that it doesn’t come into effect. I do think that more importance needs to be put on copyright laws but I think that may be taking it to the extreme.
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