lapdoggery

[GreyGeek]

http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cabl...ight-monopoly/

Since the 1980s, the US has aggressively threatened trade sanctions against countries who don’t give American companies sufficiently large competitive advantages — this is described in detail in the book Information Feudalism about the origins of the TRIPs agreement and WTO, for those interested in gory details. In practice, it works like this: industry associations in the US go to the Trade Representatives, who go to the myriad offices dealing with Foreign Policy, who go to the embassies, who talk to national governments (including the Swedish one) and demand changes to national law to benefit American corporations.

This sounds like fiction, right? But here are the documents. This document comes from the copyright industry’s trade association IIPA, mainly consisting of record and movie companies. They have listed six demands on the Swedish Government, which stand to find in the linked document:

1. Adopt the copyright law amendments on injunctive relief against ISPs and a “right of information” to permit rights holders to obtain the identity of suspected infringers from ISPs in civil cases
2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of ThePirateBay [sic]
3. Increase the prosecutorial and police manpower devoted to criminal Internet piracy enforcement
4. Commence a national criminal enforcement campaign to target source piracy and large scale Internet pirates
5. Ensure that rights holders may pursue the new civil remedies easily and quickly
6. Take an active role fostering ISP-rights holder discussions to effectively prevent protected content from being distributed without authorization over the Internet

Now, these steps are written in copyright industry legalese. Some key words that sound harmless are cause for alarm once you recognize their meaning. Translated into ordinary language, this says:

The rendition of the legalese is in the article.

This is one of the ugliest imaginable way of destroying the Net as we know it. It’s as if the Postal Service would be made responsible for the contents in a letter — for the words on the paper! — or if telecom companies would be held responsible for aiding and abetting crimes planned over the phone. If this were to come, they would only be able to allow certain predetermined, approved and harmless things to be communicated. “Press 1 to say bye.” Otherwise, they would be liable for everything said.

Needless to say, this is the American copyright industry’s dream.

The concept is completely foreign. The only thing helping somewhat against file sharing would be to kill the entire net, and this would be such an action.

The copyright industry’s lobby association Netopia is working intensely to push for exactly this, trying to spin it as “intermediary responsibility”.

Disgusting.

[woodsmoke]

Re: lapdoggery Blackmask Online

Nice post, and not a stretch of the imagination in any shape, form or fashion.

There are probably few present who remember a site called BlackMask Online. It specialized in they typing out of "pulp" magazines and such that were out of copyright before the changes in the copyright law in the U.S. about 8 to ten years ago.

Project Gutenberg, and others, with "university credentials" along with the "book industry" somehow arranged that a company could buy up any and all books out of copyright booksin a relatively short window of time and own them in perpetuity as long as they kept renewing the copyright.

There were several gyrations around with several companies but the upshot was that the "pulp" stuff was considered saleable and BlackMask was basically driven out of existence by legal tactics and deep pockets.

The laws were tweaked somewhat and now, any text that is more than X years old is considered to be in the public domain in the U.S. and that is what project Gutenberg provides, which is the "original text". That and nothing more, unless the big boys don't think that a particular book will ever make money.

The "illustrations" are "enhancements" and the big boys own the enhancements and sell the electronic book with the "text" that one can get for free and also the enhancements.

The big money makers are things like the Shadow and such which are not in project Gutenberg.

But, the point here is that the volunteers of BlackMask, and there were hundreds, did all the "scutwork" to get the text entered on myriads of books and they were squashed by the consortium of academia, business and, finally, law.

As the competition heats up and the money interests grow larger, more of this kind of stuff will happen and on a larger scale.

If one thinks "it will never happen" .....remember BlackMask Online because soon, no one else will.

Please note the capitalized words in the URL.

http://gutenberg.us/Black_Mask/index.htm

http://www.gutenberg.us/Black_Mask/g_m.htm

This is an older link but ekkkktually......there is a veritable cornucopia of online books that are not under the thumb of the present U.S. copyright law.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html

woodsmoke