Let’s stuff our fat faces and pat each other on the back while discussing the fate of the world’s poor!
The Guardian claims that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) is about to be ratified by G8 governments. The world’s eight largest economies—wasn’t it always the seven biggest economies plus Russia?—are meeting in Japan (and eating like princes!) to discuss Really Important Things. Among those is Acta, which would give customs agents, all reliably trained and educated, no doubt, the right to sift through your laptop and other digital goodies in search of pirated content.
Most of the opinions I’ve read or heard said the measure is more targeted at giant, James Bond-like international piracy rings and not snot-nosed kids with a couple of illegally download U2 songs on their iPod. Of course, at what point would said customs agent consider someone a “big enough” pirate to take further action? Lord knows I, and I imagine many of you, have thousands of songs on our hard drives that we’ve acquired over the years.
When and if Acta passes, we’ll mention it and freak out with the rest of you.
So our leaders are gonna let border agents look through all the information on our laptops? Soon, they’ll probably have the right to look into our information at home, having access to the whole thing under the guise of monitoring “illegal downloads”…
Freaky stuff right there, and there’s a lot of other stuff that doesn’t make much sense either if you look at it closer, like you can’t put music from a CD that you purchased onto your PC or mp3 player.
This is a big step for us in Canada, because as it stands now, we don’t have any laws restricting P2P files for personal use :).
This is not a big deal, finally the record labels have collected enough funds to pay the big boys via lobby groups to have this law enacted, its a big deal and Japan wants it on the top of the agenda, why ? why else to support Sony and its nonsense DRM but nobody wants to fix the pricing model thats broken today as always go after the small guy.
Its even simpler to fix this just send a chain email warning ISP’s and Record lables that if they proceed with this kind of unilateral move without debate then we will withhold the dollars from them,
Boycott ISP’s and Record lables for 12 months i believe they will get the message loud and clear soon after the 2 quarter and the booting they will get in wallstreet for lost revenues.