Copyright Police may seize iPods, Macs under G8 trade deal

Copyright Police may seize iPods, Macs under G8 trade deal

www.9to5mac.com

iPods, iPhones, laptops and other digital devices could be seized by customs officials worldwide under a new top-secret copyright policing deal being worked out between the G8 nations, reports claim.

Nations including Canada, the US and various European states (including the UK, which sits on the G8) are secretly agreeing a new pan-global state police deal in which information held on iPods and other devices could be subject to investigation by customs officials tasked with a new role, as copyright police.

Dubbed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), signatory nations will form an international coalition against copyright infringement.

(visit the link for the full news article)

So this will probably pass, giving one more reason for the thugs to search your car, send you to jail and make you pay fees. This is disgusting, and also they will probably have their own police to enforce it...private RIAA police... yeah, we are so free!

www.9to5mac.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

They can take my Macs and iPod from my cold dead fingers

Thanks for bringing this up, starred and flagged, I'd say they'd extent it to all forms of portable media.

That's outrageous. What I find most disturbing of all as a Canadian was the following:
"Local Canadian privacy advocates point out that governments have been privately negotiating these new proposals without consultation, and that the proposals revealed yesterday only surfaced due to the application of freedom of information type laws."

Basically, the government was trying to hide the depletion of rights from citizens! I wonder what else is going on behind the scenes that privacy groups haven't managed to fish out.

"Oh Ca-nada
...The True North Strong and FREE"
Give me a break.

I'm curious how they will determine what exactly has been legally added and what is an infringement of a copy right.

How do they know if the Metallica (*finger*) songs on my ipod are ripped from cd or ripped from the net?

*Other than the fact they named some 400 thousand people in a lawsuit*

What exactly will be the criteria for Copy Right Infrigment?

This has much less to do with protecting copyright than it does with setting precident for gaining access to the information stored on your portable devices.

Any time a search of your storage drive occurs, all of the information contained within can be archived for later use. For example, in the case of a laptop search they would have access to all of your email contacts, email contents, website affiliations, internet usage and search history, banking information, etc. With the touch of a button, all of it would be available to be archived for future scrutiny.

The government these days seems to have in insatiable thirst for information about YOU (and everyone else) and seems to be willing to stop at nothing to get it.

This is an information grab, plain and simple. In time, if these abuses of privacy continue to be tolerated, the trend we are seeing now will eventually lead to governmental access of all personal computing devices while connected to the internet.

Sound crazy? Let this War on Privacy continue unchecked and this scenerio is inevitible.

How do they know if the Metallica (*finger*) songs on my ipod are ripped from cd or ripped from the net?

They know, they are gods. YOU will have to prove that it's not copied material. It will be this for sure. If you have a 5 Gig Ipod full of songs, it will be ``obvious`` that it was all copied stuff. So they'll arrest you.

I'm dumbfounded.

I really can't think what they'll try to censor and ban next.

If this gets passed, then you can pretty much kiss every other freedom goodbye in the future.

Years and years ago, did they ever want to search your car radio/cassette player/walkmans for illegally copied cassette tapes? No... So why, all of a sudden, is it important to search friggin iPods???

"We want information.
Information.
Information.
Who are you?
The new number two.
Who is number one?
You are number six.
I am not a number, I am a free man!
Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha..."

(Iron Maiden - The Prisoner from The Number Of The Beast Album. One of the best records ever made. If you're reading this, you government arse-holes, it's on my iPod AND I OWN IT ON CD AND VINYL! You're not going to take me down!)

[edit on 26-5-2008 by tezzajw]

These copyright police would be given the job of checking laptops, iPods, iPhones and other personal devices for content that “infringes” on copyright laws

Don't lose sight of the fact that this would not just be directed at MP3 players. Anything with a storage device is open to seizure.

Hell, at this rate they may as well just start barging into our homes to "protect" us from copyright infringement.



But do they really care about copyright infringement? Not if the copyright belongs to you or me. Check out this clip to see how your rights to your OWN copyrighted material are in jeopardy of being stolen right out from under you:



Active thread on the new copyright bill here. If you are an artist, musician, photographer, writer etc, you need read this!

[edit on 26-5-2008 by SystemiK]

Originally posted by SystemiK
This has much less to do with protecting copyright than it does with setting precident for gaining access to the information stored on your portable devices.

Good point considering you could just delete then re-download when you need to travel.

It just seems like they'd be using it to get a lot more information than just copyrighted material.
I mean come on, it'd take them ages to check through a full 80GB iPod, like mine, and I'd be just one person on the plane!!!

It'd end up just being a huge seizure of any type of device that has a hard disk for storage.
Then how long would the wait become to get it back I ask you?

I'm a PC guy and use Zen... I'm ok. (sarcasm )

On a serious note, if this passes, I'll be getting a laptop with an extra slot for my HD. All you gotta do is take a piece of antistatic paper and fold it over the contacts of your second drive before inserting it so it doesn't read. Once you are through customs, you pull the drive, pull the paper barrier, and you have all your info back. What they see is a single drive (freshly loaded OS, of course). Your OTHER drive is the real drive. There are ways around it, if you're sneaky.

This crap is really getting to me today... 2 in 1 day?!? WTF?!? There is something deeper here... at least that's what my gut is telling me. I'm thinking that we should all start digging a bit further. It's one thing to protect artists from theft, but it's totally another to pull this crap. Sadly, I feel like all we can do is sit back and hope that the people that have the ability to pass or reject these laws have the capacity to understand the problems they could create for EVERYONE.

See what all you "too cheap to buy your music" crooks did? You've only given more leverage to crap like this. Way to go, geniuses!!

When one takes something that is not theirs and does not pay for it, that is known as stealing or theft. I hope everyone of you theives gets nailed to the wall.

Unfortunately, you're inability to do the right thing in the first place will most likely affect all the people not engaged in your shoddy practices, too. Thanks

I sometimes feel like leading a revolution against all governments, seize all politicians, presidents, generals, and lock them up...or worse...

If all people would only stand together, and take back what belongs to them for 1 single day, only 1 day, we could change everything....

Originally posted by The Soldier Of Darkness
If all people would only stand together, and take back what belongs to them for 1 single day, only 1 day, we could change everything....

People won't stand together. Religion, idiocy, bigotry and patriotism are too enshrined as segregational tools for people to truly unite with a common cause.

So, people will have to give up their iPods and hard drives. It won't be long before we have personal pin-number door-locks given to us for our own homes that the government controls. We might have to enter and leave to set curfew times, depending upon who we are. I can see all of the iPod givers also willing to hold out their arms for the microchip implants too... I don't want to think about the world that my children will grow up to live in.

reply to post by RabbitChaser


This is bs and you know it..

They are doing this to make a buck off people..

People who spend countless hours working on crap just so these asshats can use it for free... In other words killing the freelance artists..

WHy use them when you have google kicking images up for you ever 2 sex.

The clampdown continues. Soon we will have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. This is outrageous.
sp: Hooboy, it's beddy bye time!

[edit on 5/27/2008 by jpm1602]

Well that was kinda my point, but i didn't mention the "it will never happen part"

What is that saying....divide and conquer....

I read about this on the dailytech site and there is a link there to the documents on Wikileaks.

This act is potentially much more intrusive than simply giving them access to your portable media player.

The agreement covers the copying of information or ideas in a wide variety of contexts. For example page three, paragraph one is a "Pirate Bay killer" clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. This clause would also negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks.

The document reveals a proposal for a multi-lateral trade agreement of strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods hiding behind the issue of false trademarks. If adopted, a treaty of this form would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime, with new cooperation requirements upon internet service providers, including perfunctionary disclosure of customer information. The proposal also bans "anti-circumvention" measures which may affect online anonymity systems and would likely outlaw multi-region CD/DVD players.

IF this really happens, there shall be riots.

Take MUSIC away from people, and you have one big angry MOB.

Or perhaps that is the plan in the start.

In any case, they can always try to take my music away.