P2P to be made totally illegal

Not even public domain information will be allowed on P2P.

www.boingboing.net...

Secret super-copyright treaty MEMO leaked
Posted by Cory Doctorow, June 6, 2008 12:44 AM | permalink
Wikileaks has the full text of a memo concerning the dread Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a draft treaty that does away with those pesky public trade-negotiations at the United Nations (with participation from citizens' groups and public interest groups) in favor of secret, closed-door meetings where entertainment industry giants get to give marching orders to governments in private.

It's some pretty crazy reading -- among other things, ACTA will outlaw P2P (even when used to share works that are legally available, like my books), and crack down on things like region-free DVD players. All of this is taking place out of the public eye, presumably with the intention of presenting it as a fait accompli just as the ink is drying on the treaty.

Honestly, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the entertainment industry is an existential threat to the idea of free speech, open tools, and an open communications network.

does that also include games... because a lot on online games use a p2p system.

How would they even implement this... unless its exclusively in America, because last time i checked no one controlled the internet (as in WORLD wide web).

This is very easy to fight...simply stop buying music or renting videos or going to the movies for 6 month and bring them to they're knees. In 6 months it will cost them billions.
Zindo

Non violent resistance is the only answer. The powers that control want to seperate us from our one world language of knowledge exchange(again). The fearmongers are now victims of there own works. Its amazing how the invent of the global internet of 1987 coincides with the 2012 winter solstice enigma. Saving and enlightining souls everyday till the change.

I love you all

I won't have much of an impact if I don't buy any music or rent any movies. I haven't bought any new music for a few years and haven't downloaded any new music either. I do occasionally watch a movie and I do watch tv. All of the music recording industry restrictions turned me off a long time ago to using any service. Without knowing what's new and listening to it, I no longer have any interest in buying any more music. Yet they still wonder why their sales keep going down. Now the movie industry seems to be getting in on the act. Maybe I'll be keeping my current equipment around several more years to watch all the old classic movies. I'm starting to get out of date with the terms. I originally thought P2P meant Playstation 2 was going to be made illegal until I remembered what it was.

I agree with Zindo. Any sort of mass boycotting of media, TV, Music, Movies, DVDs would have the powers that be crapping their pants so fast it wouldnt even be funny.

The fact that they would lose billions is a big thing, but if they arent able to reach into our homes with the propaganda and advertising, they would be scared stiff that our long dormant brain cells might kick over and start working on their own.

Who didn't see this coming? An interesting tidbit, from the Ottawa Citizen:

Proposed secret copyright deal takes aim at iPods, providers

Mr. Fewer expressed particular concern about one area of the proposal that calls for ACTA to operate outside of accepted international forums such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization or the United Nations.

The document proposes that ACTA create its own governing body and be overseen by a committee made up of representatives from member nations. Organizing its own governing body would make ACTA unaccountable to any existing international trade organization.

"This initiative is unprecedented," he said.

The agreement is expected to be tabled at the G8 meeting in July.


Humorous tangent, since Cory Doctorow wrote the article linked in the OP:
cory doctorow visits a radio shack

This is unbelievable.

Japan was trial-testing banning P2P earlier in the year I think. I don't know how well it has worked so far, does anyone else on the forum live in Japan or know more?

Even if they do make all P2P illegal (ignoring the fact that many legitimate files are shared using such systems) how the hell do they hope to enforce it? At the very worst, most people will go back to third party filesharing sites (Megaupload etc) and you'll be back at the same problem. Using proxies and encryption could make it impossible to track downloaders at all.

Incidentally, I downloaded Cory's book the other week, and highly recommend it.

reply to post by gulfstreamsalt


it was inevitable this would occur, The entertainment industry was loosing more and more money a year and i doubt they would just back and enjoy the ride.

reply to post by gulfstreamsalt



very soon Freedom is gonna disappear from Earth. If it goes on that way, we ATS users will be jailed for national security purposes, when the NWO will take over.

Do like me, prepare a backpack with survival products and get a gun ready, and put them in your ceiling or basement in a safe place. The day it comes, you'll be a few hours ahead.

What does the entertainment industry expect? for years now people have screamed at them to drop the prices of their products, their prices have been judged time and time again to be unfair to the consumer, but yet they completely choose to ignore it.

My family spends maybe £20 a week buying games , music or movies, we also use p2p to download these things, but that is only to see if what we are going to buy is worth the money, most times it isn't, you only have to watch the TV ad's to see what is crap, the more they show you the worse it usually is.

I promise if they go towards these steps, i wont allow my family to pay a penny for this stuff, instead ill find a way to get it all for free, which most of you know is really easy, this shows that the entertainment industry is out of touch with its customers, charging extortionate amounts for things which can be sold at a fraction of the price, they cant even look after their own, just look at the writers strikes? bigotry and stubbornness, kept that strike going for months and months, hurting all branches from music to TV.

When will these people learn and listen, a fair price for a product is all people want, of course thee are those who will download no matter what the prices are, boycotting their products is the only way to send them a message and hurt them where it hurts the most, i know one person wont make a difference but when people start to do it in their thousands, then its a different ball game and will hurt them a lot, not that with the way food and fuel are going that people will be able to buy this stuff for much longer anyhow.

[edit on 8/6/2008 by azzllin]

Haven't you guys ever heard of Rapidshare / Megaupload / Freespace etc etc etc etc etc...

Torrents are a thing of the past for downloading content.

Rapidshare for example is one of many many many sites appearing around the web and has a self proclaimed storage capacity of several petabytes....

A petabyte is a million Gigabytes... or one thousand Terabytes or to be completely precise it's.....

1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes

So with several million gigabytes of storage space and files accessible through port 80 http... it would be very very very difficult to prevent freedom of information across the web..

This sort of posturing shows a complete lack of understanding by the powers that be about the way information is shared across the web..

If they decide to make p2p illegal the only services that will suffer are the legal p2p video networks like the bbc Iplayer and of course games that use p2p such as world of warcraft etc etc etc...

Anyway, Freedom of information is the weapon that the global Elite are powerless against... short of total and utter global nuclear meltdown... even then people like me who are technically skilled enough to build computers from scratch will create new networks that are not under any kind of control other than that of the users...

Power to the People!!!

NeoN HaZe


[edit on 8-6-2008 by Neon Haze]

reply to post by gulfstreamsalt


It's perfectly possible to mask P2P traffic so the ISP doesn't even know it's carrying it. Anyway, market forces won't allow this to go ahead, as there is a metric assload of money to be made using P2P technologies.

Not to mention governments and state-funded public organisations (The BBC, for example) who use these technologies to help everyone.

Meh. More scaremongering.

reply to post by ZindoDoone


I used to be big into DVD's/music/games. Until the furious crackdown on file-sharing. I admit that I did download, but I also made many more purchases as a result, being confident that I wasn't getting stuck opening something I couldn't return if it turned out to be crap.

Now I don't download, and I don't buy.

This case of a woman who lives near me really soured me...

en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by dave420
reply to post by gulfstreamsalt

 

It's perfectly possible to mask P2P traffic so the ISP doesn't even know it's carrying it. Anyway, market forces won't allow this to go ahead, as there is a metric assload of money to be made using P2P technologies.

Not to mention governments and state-funded public organisations (The BBC, for example) who use these technologies to help everyone.

Meh. More scaremongering.

Actually it's not possible to mask p2p traffic... I believe your thinking of p2p encryption, which encrypt the traffic so the isp can't read what the data is in transference..

Most isp's traffic shape p2p traffic to manage the bandwidth on their out of date networks.

If the p2p protocal is to be made illegal then all isp's would have to buy into some very expensive hardware that would prevent p2p transference.

But as I said, it will be all in vein as people will share by other means... There maybe even some other form of protocol developed that circumnavigates the law and it goes on and on and on..

The Internet is unstoppable now. too many users, too many people with knowledge of how it all works..

The point of enforcement was talked about earlier. It won't be enforced at the user level. it will be the ISP's that will be legislated against and prosecuted.

This is a legal minefield and one that I very very doubt will come to pass, as it only needs a single false prosecution to come to light and the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down around the ears of the entertainment industry..

What should happen is the entertainment industry should invest in upgrading the networks around the world... invest in their isp conduits and then offer true content on demand at a subscription...

I pay Sky Satellite TV £40 a month for receiving their service... they have now launched a video on demand service called SKYPlayer... This is the way forward..

The Majority of people will use these services and the minority will share online...

Power to the People...

NeoN HaZe

[edit on 8-6-2008 by Neon Haze]

P2P isn't a singular protocol and not only file sharing is done trough it.

* File sharing (using application layer protocols as BitTorrent)
* VoIP (using application layer protocols as SIP)
* Streaming media
* Instant messaging (MSN, AIM, YIM, Google's Chat, ...)
* Software publication and distribution (Steam)
* Media publication and distribution (radio, video)

Alot of TV broadcasting networks are underway in implementing distribution of their broadcasts trough P2P type applications, some are even modifying Bittorrent itself for this purpouse.

Outlawing P2P outright will set technology back decades and will also cause some very big corps that have nothing to do with entertainment, to get a good chunk of their business to become illegal.

Originally posted by thematrix
P2P isn't a singular protocol and not only file sharing is done trough it.

Outlawing P2P outright will set technology back decades and will also cause some very big corps that have nothing to do with entertainment, to get a good chunk of their business to become illegal.

Nice one the matrix.. you nailed it right on the head.

I couldn't say it better myself.

You are spot on!!!

The Logistics of outlawing p2p networking are so horendious that this will never come into play.

Power to the People

NeoN HaZe

Originally posted by thematrix
P2P isn't a singular protocol and not only file sharing is done trough it.
* File sharing (using application layer protocols as BitTorrent)
* VoIP (using application layer protocols as SIP)
* Streaming media
* Instant messaging (MSN, AIM, YIM, Google's Chat, ...)
* Software publication and distribution (Steam)
* Media publication and distribution (radio, video)
Alot of TV broadcasting networks are underway in implementing distribution of their broadcasts trough P2P type applications, some are even modifying Bittorrent itself for this purpouse.

BBC iplayer uses p2p systems as well, I think in order to work.

People seem to think that using bitTorrent automatically means it's illegal. Not everyone has the finances for running main servers either, and BitTorrent is handy then, since the main server doesn't do all the work. For example you can get GNU Linux through it. Thats not illegal, and other things besides that can be downloaded.

And if we're talking of getting rid of things on computers that can be used illegally, maybe they should get rid of Visual studio, gcc and any other compilers, since you can make viruses/spyware with them. And free programs to put greedy microsoft into bankruptcy, one day perhaps,

Originally posted by ZindoDoone
This is very easy to fight...simply stop buying music or renting videos or going to the movies for 6 month and bring them to they're knees. In 6 months it will cost them billions.
Zindo

Six months and they will hand cash out to us.

The nazis in charge really don't like not knowing what we send each other do they ?

I use P2P to recieve large amounts of documentation and resources which are all 100% legal.

This is the entertainment nazis pushing hard for their will to prevail against the entire world.

They really do hate the little mans freedoms don't they ?

World of Warcraft uses P2P running in the background to push down future patch content. Definitely a legitimate, legal use of P2P technology.

Given the state of the economy, if P2P gets blocked, and more people are prosecuted for obtaining copyrighted works without paying for them, the entertainment industry is only going to hurt themselves. Pretty much everything we're talking about can be considered luxury goods, or things that people spend disposable income on. But these days, with rising gas prices, internet/TV providers constantly raising rates, unemployment going up, taxes increasing, and so on, fewer and fewer people have extra money to blow on music, movies, books, and whatever else. Unfortunately the next best option is to grab those things online, for free, so it does make sense that an increasing number of people would choose to download stuff instead of buying.

But does the government actually think that if they eliminate the illegal online option that it's going to wind up putting money back into the entertainment industry? I mean, for crying out loud, people are siphoning gas out of cars illegally, sleeping in their vehicles, and having to settle for jobs that pay minimum wage instead of the office work they're used to.

I wish the big wigs in Washington DC would find something more constructive to spend time on rather than some bill that is only going to alienate more people from enjoying the internet. So Britney Spears loses a few hundred thousand bucks, big deal! She's already made countless millions, so I can't imagine she'd miss a fraction of it. How about the government puts some energy into figuring out how to fix this cluster^@#$ they helped create in the Middle East, or maybe drive to see the homeless in the states they report to so they can understand how many people are NOT going to be buying those CDs, books, and DVDs even if P2P is blocked.