I'm heating up my popcorn kernels in a large pot of oil as we speak, things are about to get very entertaining. If Antigua start a piracy website selling US copyrighted material, won't the US just ban access to the site and other countries (definitely the UK and Australia) will follow suit? Potentially resulting in free-speech and Internet rights advocacy groups (and the likes of anonymous) kicking up a massive storm of trouble?
It's obvious the bans on Internet gambling is due to the fact it's hard to regulate and it's even harder to tax and when it comes down to it, it's all about money. The US only has themselves to blame, this isn't about protecting people from addictions because lets face it if you want to gamble legally you can go to a casino and if you want drugs you can walk down to the corner and if you want booze you can go to a bottle shop or bar. What's the difference between Internet gambling and going to a casino? The government can tax non-Internet based casinos...
If it gets that far and something isn't worked out prior, this will be an interesting test of Obama's merits as a president and where he stands on things like unrestricted and free Internet access. Given the US's harsh words against China's censorship over the years, it would be pretty ironic if the US were to block such a site.
Currently, the US has no ability to do this, they have no country-wide firewall like China.
At best, they can revoke/hijack the domain name, since ICANN is pretty much under US influence, but the site would remain accessible by IP address, and it is likely that tens/hundreds of alternative domain names would be set up by the site supporters.
Or, the US could hijack the IP space with BGP black holing/null routing, but this would be seen as an extremely offensive act. It would be the first time a western country does this AFAIK.
Or simply ask the major ISPs to block it. They are already opting into 6 strikes and throttling certain types of traffic (e.g. torrents). It wouldn't surprise me at all if they "voluntarily" (or really, voluntarily) blocked such sites.
This is the exact kind of blocking I was thinking of. Merely blocking the domain would be enough to prevent access from basic users but maybe not knowledgeable pirates, similar to what has happened with The Pirate Bay in the UK and ISP's blocking access to it.
Yeah, it was circumvented Pretty quickly. You can't outsmart a pirate. It's a good example of a government trying to restrict what it's citizens can do however, even if it failed the government tried to block access in the first place.
You can't generally bludgeon them with force, you can't outsmart them forever, but sure. People can and do outsmart pirates, it's just rare and those "combatting" usually aren't creative or empowered enough to make the right (er, effective?) decisions.
I can't think of a situation where they've ever needed too. With exception of Antigua and perhaps a few other obscure countries there doesn't appear to be a distance the IFPI's arms don't reach as shown in the Pirate Bay situation and what has happened to its founders and is continually ongoing.
This situation is very much different. They don't have the government in their pockets this time around like all other major copyright cases before them which is why this situation is super interesting.
What about accessing it from outside of US? Can the USA block access to Antigua for Poland? Technically? And politically? I would guess they would rather come to our government and ask it to block Antigua - but even that would generate insane drama.
The US blocks sites by seizing their domain names and drying up their revenue streams. For example, they could make it illegal for advertising networks to do business with the Antiguan pirate site, enact an embargo of Antigua banning all business with the country, or simply "exert pressure" on payment processors and ad networks to comply.
This is how the WTO is able to enforce its regulations. Because the WTO can't actually forced a country to pay another for unfair trade practices (the WTO doesn't have an army), the WTO is allowed to permit winning plaintiffs to break agreements or enact retaliatory tarrifs to recoup losses[1]
It comes down to comparative advantage[2]: Countries are better off by opening up free trade and thus have an incentive to keep things relatively open. The WTO acts as intermediary to prevent an arms race of tariffs and retaliatory actions that end up hurting countries in the long run. It seems ironic because the WTO is letting another country enact a retaliatory tariff but for the most part the WTO is one of the more effective global institutions at enforcing its principal.
There is a lot more nuance but I hope this helps explain this a little more.
While it's true a few misguided Family First types have proposed mandatory filtering laws for Australia such laws are not in place and have repeatedly suffered setbacks. The other side of that coin is Australia has had one of its major ISPs defend all the way to the Supreme Court the right not to monitor the torrenting behaviour of its users.
It's a robust and engaged debate here in Australia and the country hasn't followed the American industry lead on tracking piracy.
I live in Australia and get to see first hand everyday just how backwards our country is (I'm guessing you do as well). We are regarded as one of the United States closest allies and friends, as well as trade partners. Do you think Australia would say no if the US said, "This country is illegally infringing on our copyrights and selling pirated material, we ask if you would please kindly block this site" I am only assuming, but something tells me we wouldn't say no and there's no way to dispel that until push came to shove.
The ISP case you speak of (is different to what I am proposing could happen. That case was in regards to whether or not an ISP should be held liable for its users actions and whether or not ISP's should be monitoring traffic to ensure it's customers aren't infringing. Filtering on the other hand is an already partially implemented thing, it's for filtering sites related to child abuse and other banned and obscene content (at the moment), but that's not to say it couldn't be used to block "other" URL's as well.
While we as a country haven't followed the United States lead on piracy (most likely due to stark differences between how our Governments and legal system works) that's not to say it couldn't happen. I mean our country only just passed an 18+ rating for computer games...
As you live in Australia you are, assuming citizenship, as much "Australia" as anybody else can claim to be.
Currently the only blocking happening all across Australia at the country level is that of Interpol listed actual child porn sites and that debate about whether or not that is the right approach is still ongoing - take part in it.
Should the US request the blocking of a non US site that is trading US copyrighted material but not breaking International law I wouldn't assume that Australia would comply with that request. iiNet has already declined to comply with US industry requests to rat out the free trade of US copyright material and various russian sites that charge for access to massive databases of US copyrighted music and movies haven't yet been blocked either.
I live in Australia, yes, I've also travelled the world extensively and I've first hand knowledge of just how backwards many countries are; I'd urge you to maintain your rage and nuture it to maturity and become engaged in Australian policy as that's all that prevents us from being as backwards as you think. Australia has problems, yes, but they are, with various exceptions such as Aboriginal health and community relations, pretty much first world problems.
Defeost, I like you. That was a really good reply, I completely agree with all of your points. I would love to be able to play a more important part in shaping the direction of this country's morals especially on topics such as copyright infringement. It's a very complex and definitely hard thing to debate, there are pros and cons no matter what side you choose to stand on. Definitely agree on the problems front. Indigenous health is something that definitely has a long way to go and is very much a serious problem worth more time and consideration as opposed to a first world problem which at this stage hasn't even happened yet.
>While it's true a few misguided Family First types have proposed mandatory filtering laws for Australia such laws are not in place
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but http://delimiter.com.au/2012/11/14/iinet-internode-implement...
This is for obscene content but it appears that there is at present no legal barrier to the government just issuing further Section 313 orders that would block websites that breach other laws.
It's a robust debate and a complicated one, to be sure.
That's the state of play as a few months back, iiNet has agreed to filter the interpol list of serious child porn sites and that's:
- not the same as the initial black hole, black list initially proposed
- something I have far less of an issue with, particularly if a significant proportion and cross section of the population has access to the list (still being ironed out)
- the story's still not played out (and hopefully remains in play, forever, as a point of active debate for Australian society).
Thanks for posting the link, I was aware of that and deliberately simplifying above.
Coming back to the banning of Antigua from within Australia should the US do so, I can see that being proposed and raised up the mast here, I don't see it being pushed out and actually floated quite so easily.
If they are so serious why are they allowed to operate? Are there really jurisdictions that allow them to operate with impunity? Or are these sites really in legal grey zones[1]?
[1] e.g. Country A says that you must be 21+ to appear in porn, but Country B says that you only need to be 18+.
The last time I had the, ahh, privilege, of checking sites on a current Interpol watch list was nearly a decade ago.
The content I viewed was more along the lines of Country Z that effectively allowed trade in human beings and the hosting of images of interesting things you could do with pool cues and 10 year olds. The material wasn't really subject to the kinds of ambiguity that, say, /r/jailbait on reddit skated. If not image sites then forum sites more or less dedicated active discussion of an unambiguous nature.
Not all the world is policed effectively and the debate about what should and shouldn't be policed within your own local neighbourhood, your state, your country, and in other countries is ongoing.
Globally we also have the wholesale manufacture, marketing, and distribution of weapons; the indiscriminate asset stripping of regions in turmoil to further the manufacture of mobile phones et al; and the offshoring of hazardous wastes to become somebody elses problem. These are things that arguably do more damage than actual child exploitation but tend to trip the moral compass less.
Hopefully one of the benefits of the Internet is greater global communication about and engagement with all of these issues.
I don't really expect it to happen either; sounds more like a power play to get the US to finally cough up some restitution for the claimed billions in losses that Antiguan economy has suffered. If it does play out though, things will get very interesting.
Sometime, maybe 20 years from now, you are going to be able to say "I was there when everyone was figuring out copyrights and patents and stuff."
That said, its an interesting maneuver on Antigua's part. Using the WTO rules to push the conversation along. The article on Ars Technica about the Dutch not liking the attention they are getting for facilitating tax avoidance is another interesting piece of this puzzle. I could imagine a number of ways this might branch, from a 'economic zone' which is "the internet" to a outright revolt by the people and the creation of multiple 'shadow' internets.
These are the 'conversations' that I find very interesting:
"Where" is the Internet with respect to taxation and commercial commerce doctrine?
"What" is role of the economic powers in shaping that doctrine, and "who" is the economic power with the most influence? (Currently its the US but it will be China in 5 years if the trend continues)
What is the role of the nation-state in person-to-person interstate commerce? What "should" it be?
All very very interesting questions and discussions that drive a lot of action from pornography, to gambling, to software sales, to chat rooms.
Antigua has had the rights to $21M worth of US copyrights since 2005. They'd originally won $4B, but the US got that cut down to $21M.
Frankly, it's about time they started taking advantage of this. It's only been what, 7 years? That's $147M of unclaimed revenue which could have been used for schools and their local economy (it's a small island nation).
Back in the day, I thought it would be cool if they used the ruling to run a private World of Warcraft server. There are other more interesting things besides music and movies that they have the right to copy - e.g. Elsevier journal articles.
> Sometime, maybe 20 years from now, you are going to be able to say "I was there when everyone was figuring out copyrights and patents and stuff."
I love your optimism that this issue will be resolved in 20 years, but I don't share it. In 20 years patents issued today will barely be expiring and copyrights issued today will have ~90 years left, depending on the author's date of death.
I find the conversations you mention interesting, but frustrating, since most deep philosophical questions regarding law are resolved not by the moralists or philosophers but by the lobbyists and the pre-lobbyist politicians.
I'm just waiting for a ruling or law that says digital purchases confer the same rights (of resale, of perpetual use without asking permission) as sales of physical media. Period. This is crucial for ebooks in particular.
Until then, we won't be able to declare this madness over and look back.
I don't know how you can solve that problem. The right of first sale works great when you have an item that, once sold, it guaranteed to be out of your possession. With digital media, it suddenly gets really murky: what does first sale mean if I can trivially hand you a copy?
As long as DRM is involved, you don't really own it, so we have to assume the removal of DRM as a pre-cursor to even being able to consider this question, but, once it's gone, thing thing your are selling is...what?
I don't foresee this being answered without a wholesale "information is free" society.
I'm a bit confused by this. Antigua is a party to the Berne Convention, which requires them to recognize the copyright of works by authors of other Berne countries the same way it recognizes those of its own authors.
Can the WTO override this? I'd expect that all the WTO could say is that it is not a violation of treaties and agreements that the WTO oversees for Antigua to pursue this remedy for the WTO violation, but that wouldn't relieve Antigua of obligations under non-WTO treaties.
It's been a long time since I've read the relevant treaties and agreements, so maybe I've forgotten or overlooked something.
If necessary, Antigua could remove copyright protections to Antiguan authors (at a loss of nearly $0), in exchange for letting Antiguans ignore foregin copyrights (at a gain of >>$0)
It's about time internet gambling became available in the USA and this prohibition-type nonsense ended once and for all. I don't see why doing it on the casino floor in Vegas is fine but doing it at home isn't. Sure it's addictive but so is alcohol, and you don't have to step outside your home to drink that. The nanny state must go.
I don't see why doing it on the casino floor in Vegas is fine but doing it at home isn't.
Because it's damned hard to tax gambling winnings when they happen outside the US government's jurisdiction. A brick-and-mortar casino in Vegas will issue you a 1099 if you win enough; a virtual casino in Antigua is under no such obligation.
If that was the rationale, then why aren't US virtual casinos (which are subject to IRS requirements to collect W9s and issue 1099s) allowed?
There are tons of affiliate marketers online making money from non-US affiliate networks. By the same logic we should ban affiliate marketing in its entirety too - none of those networks issue 1099s...
1. It's online gambling is easier to ban than affiliate marketing networks.
2. Attacking traditional vices like gambling can be a political slam-dunk. Just the same as counting the number of convictions under your belt to appeal to 'law and order' types of voters.
3. US casinos probably make some amount of political contributions. Banning foreign gambling sites cuts competition.
How does that work when you "win" but have actually lost? If I go into a casino, spend 20k, then win back 15k, have I actually lost more than the difference 5k because that 15k is taxed?
For amateurs, the IRS has a concept of gambling "sessions". You net your win/loss within a session. You report the total of all winning sessions as income, and itemize your losing sessions (which can't exceed wins).
States and cities have varying laws. Basically most states with casinos allow you to do the same as on federal returns. Those without require you to report all wins as income and not deduct losses, effectively making it impossible to gamble with any regularity (since you could easily owe taxes on $200k of income, of which you only saw $10k... or worse, -$10k).
Pros can simply net their wins/losses (while maintaining a record-keeping notebook). To qualify as a pro you have to derive almost all income from gambling.
Gamblers get worried when people want to close tax loopholes (such as itemized deductions for certain things). They can come scarily close to losing their way of making a living.
I don't know how the casino handle it in practice, but theoretically, if you can itemize, you'll get it back at the end of the year (up to the extend of your winnings).
>One option would be to ask users for $5 a month in return for unlimited access to U.S. media.
Day 1 customer if this is true. I live in Bolivia and will pirate it anyway, the US media corporations refuse to price things according to my location, so screw em.
How would Antigua measure $21 million of copyright? For music and movies, would it be the publisher-suggested retail price of albums and blu-ray discs?
If they want to sell the content online, how do they even find out content pricing when publishers don't sell direct and give different prices to different retailers?
If they want to sell content subscriptions, how can they guess how much content they could stream for $21 million?
I would donate more than that to any entity that wants to disrupt this overbearing copyright industry, and that goes especially for sovereign nations.
I'm hoping Antigua goes all out and becomes a data haven that refuses to extradite for IP infringement. Maybe then the industries that are innovating solely in the field of amount of money per lawsuit will then be forced to compete on the merits of their offerings.
I really think this is interesting for a couple of reasons:
1. The US, who is a member of the WTO, thinks it doesn't need to comply with its ruling.
2. If this does happen, it will be interesting to see if the US tries to interfere with it. For example, would the US try to prevent people from reaching the site and would they pressure finance companies to keep people from buying from it?
The WTO granted Antigua the right to suspend US copyright to the tune of $21 million annually in 2007 because the US ignored the WTO's earlier (2005) ruling that the US violated international free-trade laws by barring Antiguan gambling companies from the US market. Antigua now plans to actually use that ruling to legally sell US copyrighted material over the Internet without paying copyright holders.
They can't tax it in either direction, the operators, being out of jurisdiction, are not liable for taxes, and the winnings that should count as income do not get reported anywhere.
Oh come on. The US would never nuke someone over something like this. If they did then every nation on earth would have to consider the US the worst kind of hostile and react accordingly.
Oh, absolutely. I thought that went without saying. My point was only that the US is not powerless against other nations like a queen under attack by a knight that is also attacking the king. There is a way out other than US copyrights going away, though I'm not sure what it is.
Pirated content is already available in US and other countries via thepiratebay and other torrents sites. Pirating copyrighted content is already considered illegal in the US, and is being actively monitored by media companies.
If this Antiguan website indeed becomes accessible to Americans, or say other country, how will downloading from this site differ from downloading via torrents. Since torrent usage is already being monitored in US, there's a high likelihood that American ISPs would monitor the usage of this site as well.
"Pirating" is the act of acquiring a copy of a copyrighted work in a way that is contrary to existing law. "Downloading" Copyrighted works can be done completely legally, the simplest example being to buy a copy of a movie on itunes and transferring it to your phone or tablet. This is a 'third' way of legally downloading content which is sort of like buying property with a tax lien on it, the government (in this case the WTO) has stepped in, set aside the rights of the property owner, and is sanctioning an action to make whole the person or entity who is wronged.
So the WTO sets aside the rights of US Copyright holders and allows Antiqua to sell those works, allowing it to recover damages that the US Government has failed to pay. The government could "pay" the $21M fine and the WTO would rescind this, but if they do that then they show that they are wrong in denying access to the US market for Antiqua gambling interests. If they don't pay it, they are bound by membership in the WTO to abide by its decisions. It is a delicious paradox.
""Pirating" is the act of acquiring a copy of a copyrighted work in a way that is contrary to existing law."
Okay - I'll bite. What does that mean? How does one acquire a copy of a copyrighted work in a way that is contrary to existing law? Or, alternatively, How does one acquire a copy of a copyrighted work in a way that is compliant with existing law? As a "Pro-IP Law" enthusiast, I'm genuinely interested - my layperson's understanding of the law is that it deals with distribution, not downloading.
Its pretty simple actually, the owner of the copy 'right' expressly authorizes the copy being given to you. That is in accordance with the law. So any number of examples, you buy a book at the book store, you buy a DVD, you watch a movie at the theater, all of these actions result in a 'copy' of the work coming into your possession that is sanctioned by the owner of the right.
Any illegal copy is one in which the owner hasn't sanctioned transferring a copy to you.
Copyright law carves out specific exemptions for lending libraries and the First Sale doctrine, part of the unified commercial code (UCC) gives you the right to transfer your copy to a third party as long as no new copies are created (so you no longer have a copy).
Note I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Downloading copyrighted content is already considered illegal in US"
Not to my knowledge - I'd be happy to be corrected on this though. My understanding is that it's only the unauthorized distribution that's illegal, not the downloading. In this situation, Antigua has a WTO authorization.
The reason why torrents are illegal, is that most clients turn you into a distribution node as well as downloading node.
Yes. If you accidentally say "stealing" the word police will be all over you, but for some reason the misconception that downloading and uploading are equivalent goes uncorrected.
And - it's a very important distinction. How do I know that the movies, songs, tv that I download from itunes.com, amazon.com, mp3.com, musicmp3.ru, mp3shake.com, etc, etc.. are authorized to sell them to me?
Well in the case of iTunes and Amazon they have written agreements with the copyright holders which give them permission to sell you copies as long as they pay the copyright holder a specific amount of money.
The way you know this is the case is that copyright holders sue people without such agreements in the court system. So when a record label sues Amazon for some service that offers copies of music, you can infer that the music label does not believe that there is an agreement in place which gives Amazon that right.
There are dozens (at least) of sources of music on the internet, with authentic sounding/looking web-fronts. I'm not really sure whether, prior to downloading music from that site, it's (A) reasonable to expect someone about to download music to do a full court-system search in all relevant jurisdictions to determine if a copyright suit has been filed against said web-fronts, and (B) even more complex, make a legal assessment of the validity of that lawsuit.
While I think the vast majority of us would agree that there is no practical liability for downloading music from iTunes/Amazon/mp3.com/etc... without doing a full legal assessment of that activity, I'm genuinely interested as to whether there is any De Jure legal liability (on the part of the downloader) associated with purchasing/downloading content in which the distributor had not fully obtained distribution rights.
Then there's http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap6.html#602 in the event you're downloading internationally. I'm not sure downloading counts as importing, but even so it specifically excludes people importing a single copy for private use.
The good news is you don't have to. You're not, afaik, liable for buying an MP3 from Amazon which later turns out to be unauthorized.
The closest I believe anyone has ever come is when an unauthorized copy of 1984 showed up, Amazon zapped it from people's Kindles (and gave refunds, and promised to not do that again). None of those people were in any danger of being sued.
But, how is an average person supposed to tell the difference between iTunes, Amazon, and a "download this song for free" site they found on Google, that just so happens to use BitTorrent for distributing those files?
BitTorrent links don't work without installing a BitTorrent client?
I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but ignorance of the law has never been an effective defense (for any law), and neither has the "but I was tricked" defense. This is not peculiar to copyright law or computer law. There have been some cases where people did succeed with "I had so much malware, I didn't know what my computer was doing", but that's something you'll have to argue in court.
But why should consumers presume that installing a BitTorrent client means that the download is illegal? It's an unjust expectation on the part of the copyright holders. Note that I'm not necessarily arguing with you specifically, but with the idea that it's obvious that some downloads are legal and others are not, as well as the idea that "BitTorrent" automatically means illegal.
When you install BItTorrent, you become a distributor. You better make sure that you have distribution rights for any IP that you are distributing, or you are violating copyright law. That part is straight forward, and has been pretty much settled in the last decade.
That doesn't mean the settled law is right. How is the average person supposed to know that their torrent client is "seeding"? Ask anybody off the street who the distributor is in that kind of system and they'll say it's the one who uploaded the .torrent, just like the distributor is Adobe or Blizzard or the BBC when they use P2P to distribute stuff.
I think the difference here is that Antigua is going to sell the pirated material, while usually it's distributed without fees. It's hard to say how successful such effort would be for Antigua (competing with the same free pirated content), but some can support it just to make the point.
Pirating hasn't been tested in the courts, really, it's the distributing that will get you a lawsuit. This is because what would that law look like? If someone sent you an email with a newspaper article inside you'd be violating it.
How much bandwidth does Antigua have? Depending on whether they can delegate their "piracy" privilege to companies in other countries, that might be the limiting factor.
> "TorrentFreak is in the process of obtaining details of the content to be offered and the prices to be charged. One option would be to ask users for $5 a month in return for unlimited access to U.S. media."
I live in Bolivia and have a semi-decent internet connection. If such a website existed where I could pay 5 to 10$ per month and I could stream unlimited videos in decent quality (think 360 to 480p from YouTube) I would pay it hands down.
It's a matter of conveneance and good service, both of which piracy doesn't offer.
Why do I pirate media? It's just too expensive for me and the general people in 3rd world countries.
No torrent site has the convenience of Netflix, and Netflix itself is still a bit behind cable tv in convenience - I want some kind of "channel" experience for Netflix, I think there are some devices in the U.S. that offer it, but none here in Uruguay.
Convenience. If they give me the proper rip with all the subtitles and everything, and it's a direct download instead of a slow-spin-up torrent then I'd pay for it.
I wonder why Antigua picked that particular industry, actually? There is simply no god-given right to profit from organized gambling. Why don't they organize an alternative banking system instead? That should be much more profitable, and nobody would object to getting rid of the current politician-controlled banking industry, unless they engage in charging usurious interests or in similar abuse.
It's obvious the bans on Internet gambling is due to the fact it's hard to regulate and it's even harder to tax and when it comes down to it, it's all about money. The US only has themselves to blame, this isn't about protecting people from addictions because lets face it if you want to gamble legally you can go to a casino and if you want drugs you can walk down to the corner and if you want booze you can go to a bottle shop or bar. What's the difference between Internet gambling and going to a casino? The government can tax non-Internet based casinos...
If it gets that far and something isn't worked out prior, this will be an interesting test of Obama's merits as a president and where he stands on things like unrestricted and free Internet access. Given the US's harsh words against China's censorship over the years, it would be pretty ironic if the US were to block such a site.