The answer to stop piracy? Mass censorship of the internet

[MusicallyInspired]

That's crap. Everyone deserves privacy. Pirate or not. I'm not saying piracy is alright, but any chance of tearing away internet anonymity and privacy is bad in my book. I don't care how bad people pirate.

[BBP]

Unfortunately Twitter is now starting to censor tweets by country, contradicting what they said during the Arabian spring.

[MusicallyInspired]

All ACTA seems to be, from someone much smarter than I who knows the intricacies of law who read it and explained it, is that it's "nothing more than just a set of agreements so that if one country's copyrights are violated in another country, said other country will take action via their own laws."

[therogue]

One can certainly argue that but what still stands is that the European Parliament has had no access to this mandate while the EP is there to represent the citizens.

Moreover, it could potentially limit access to generic drugs for developing countries, what ACTA does is treat a generic drug for which allowances are made under the TRIPPS agreement as a counterfeit one. Thus the patent holders can have those drugs seized and destroyed. Generic drugs are extremely important for developing countries which can't afford the payments on patented drugs.

Regarding internetfreedom. ACTA can potentially be used to make ISPs liable for illegal content despite other European legislation contradicting this. On a more personal level, this could also be used to extensively search people's music players/computers/etc at national border crossings and having even one downloaded file could lead to charges. This despite downloading not being illegal in some EU countries. I realise that ACTA is not meant to target individuals who aren't using pirated files for commercial gain but all it takes is one cranky customs officer who can use it to make your life very difficult. The exclusion may be there for travelers with files for strict personal use but it makes no sense as a search would still have to be performed to find out if there is large scale sharing or not.

The European Commission has published '10 myths about ACTA' but even this is full of inacuracies.
http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2 ... 148964.pdf

More in general, the way US policy is pushed on a global level scares me. Take the the O'Dwyer case, he's a UK citizen hosting a website with no US connection and servers based elswhere. The website points out where non licenced streams of TV shows are, a practice which is not illegal in the UK. The US want him extradited to face charges in the US on the basis that the website used the .com domain despite this generally being regarded as a generic domain. Now don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not in favour of large scale piracy but the ease with what many EU countries extradite their own citizens to the US is scary.

[DeadPoolX]

The US want him extradited to face charges in the US on the basis that the website used the .com domain despite this generally being regarded as a generic domain. Now don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not in favour of large scale piracy but the ease with what many EU countries extradite their own citizens to the US is scary.

The problem is that ".com" was originally US-based, but then became a generic domain later on. So there are bound to be some people who still don't realize or understand the change.

It's an easy misconception to make. After all, how many US sites use ".com" versus how many non-US sites? Canada, for instance, has some sites with ".com" but most use ".ca" so the difference is easy to distinguish.

Look at Amazon: In the US it's Amazon.com; in Canada it's Amazon.ca; in Germany it's Amazon.de; in the UK it's Amazon.co.uk, and so on. So despite ".com" not being a definite indicator of a US-based site, it's still used more often in the US than outside of it.

I do agree that some American policies are nuts, but if foreign countries hand over their citizens, that's a fault with that own country's government, not the United States. Sure, the US can ask (even demand) someone be extradited, but the foreign country in question has absolutely no obligation to obey, especially for a lesser crime like IP piracy.

I'd be more inclined to agree with the US here if someone committed murder and then ran to a European country to hide, but that's a different situation entirely.

[therogue]

I do agree that some American policies are nuts, but if foreign countries hand over their citizens, that's a fault with that own country's government, not the United States. Sure, the US can ask (even demand) someone be extradited, but the foreign country in question has absolutely no obligation to obey, especially for a lesser crime like IP piracy.

I do agree that its very much the fault of the EU country involved. It's maddening that citizens will be handed over in cases where the crime involved is considered far less severe in one's own country than the US but its still done because its politically better for the country despite many Euro countries having laws against extraditing its own citizens to countries with the death penalty and countries with problematic justice systems. I agree though, its not a black and white situation, in cases of serious crimes like murder/human trafficking/forced prostitution etc extradition should be done but as it stands the laws are far too favourable towards the US.