To ACTA or Not To ACTA

That is the question this September where 27 nations including the US will try to enact the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA deals with “piracy over the Internet,” which includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, censorship and downloading. This treaty would create a global organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, to control globally copyright and intellectual property rights.

President Obama earlier this year has already expressed support for the agreement, saying it was necessary to protect American businesses and technologies. If that’s the case, Obama is justified for it’s his job to protect American interests. When intellectual property is copied by foreign entities it’s means lost jobs for American workers.

U.S. movie, music, software and other copyright-based industries calculate a loss of more than $16 billion in sales every year from pirated versions of their products. Many of these counterfeit and pirated goods are made in China.

Unfortunately, China, where in 2006 the US filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization for inadequate enforcement of copyright protections, is not part of ACTA. In fact, China just might use ACTA to justify their “great firewall” of censorship, and many ACTA critics here fear that any signatory nation could use it to justify censorship as well.

But, ACTA critics also fear far worse. According to www.anti-acta.com, ACTA would overrule any law in a signatory country, and deal harsher, unfair and ineffective punishment to anyone suspected of piracy, all without a court trial. And it could be anyone who is just suspected of listening or uploading a song illegally. Watch out teenagers. It’d be better to be a stopped as an illegal on his way to getting an ice cream cone in Arizona.

But, ACTA doesn’t just go after an errant urchin or two. It also makes Internet Service Providers (ISP) legally responsible for their user’s downloaded content. ISPs could become worse than Windows Vista, but instead of the constant, “Did you initiate that action?” Questioning instead would be, “Do you own this song’s legal copyright?” Or worse still, “Are you the artist formally known as Prince?”

If not, an otherwise innocent Internet interloper could quickly find himself a criminal and incur a huge fine. Recently, the RIAA (Recording Industries Association of America) sued a 12 year old girl for downloading. And RIAA only seeks $150,000 per song violation.

International negotiations on ACTA have largely been done secretly. It’s another ObamaCare moment. We’ll only find out what’s in the treaty after it’s be ratified. Luckily, the agreement has been leaked and already several European privacy organizations have wrote an open letter that stated, “The current draft of ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy.”

One organization went further arguing, “ACTA will create a culture of surveillance and suspicion.” Aaron Shaw, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, argues that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”

For its part the European Commission in 2008 denied that negotiations were undertaken in secret. Their explanation was, “For reasons of efficiency, it is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public.” In other words, it’s not secrecy; it’s efficiency that things are done without public scrutiny.

Their idea of public disclosure is simply announcing negotiations are taking place but not the results. Now that’s where Democrats got the idea on how to pass ObamaCare. However, it’s not like ACTA is the war plans for the D-day invasion. Secrecy only breeds distrust, and from the agreement’s leak now we see why.

Terms like piracy use too broad of a definition, which could be interpreted as any “willful large scale infringements.” Legitimate entrepreneurs and civilians can be criminalized with excessive penalties. The following are examples of such infringements:

• a newspaper, whistle blower or blogger revealing a document,
• ambiguous cases of trademark confusion,
• parallel importation buying and selling of genuine products,
• making a product or medicine where patents have unclear scope and validity
• same with unexamined design right on the production of spare parts,
• an office worker emailing a copy of a market research report to another coworker,
• emailing a list of people violating an unexamined database right,
• a library, preserving digital sound recordings for posterity, unlawfully breaking technical protection each time it lawfully receives a sound recording,
• Youngsters enthusiastically sharing their favorite music with friends.

The end result may be a total shutdown of the Internet, one of the last vestiges of liberty on this planet. And that may very well be the true intent of ACTA.

references:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/americas/07iht-piracy.1909766.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100315/0229228556.shtml

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67J5A220100821

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

http://werebuild.eu/wiki/index.php?title=ACTA#Actors_and_lobbies

Leaked documents reveal draft text of top-secret global copyright deal
montrealgazette.com ^ |

That Anomalous Arctic

The stories have been in the news but not necessarily on the front page nor been the newspaper headlines, and they’ve not been the lead stories on television news. But make no mistake. These stories have been around and have become the counter attack to ClimateGate and the not all too surprising follow-up to 2009, currently the supposed warmest year on record.

Now the alarmists claim that since March each successive month has been the warmest ever. And if this trend continues, then without a doubt 2010 will eclipse 2009 and become the new banner record year for global warming. In fact, they already claim 2010 will be unless a deep La Nina develops quickly. But, questions remain. Were they truly the warmest months?

Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in conjunction with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claim that. But, as of late these scientific as well as governmental organizations have lost much of their credibility. GISS under the command of its director, Dr. James Hansen, has become more “govern-mental” than anything else.

In 2008, Hansen had proudly announced that particular October to be the warmest ever. Yet, quickly afterwards busybody bloggers discovered that Russian September’s temperature data had been copied to October’s verbatim. Since temperatures in this Northern region are rapidly cooling, this little “trick,” as alarmists are apt to do, produced the desired results as well as the headlines except those blasted bloggers botched it.

Hansen still claimed that October 2008 was the hottest. He just managed to find hotspots over the Hudson Bay in Canada that conveniently nobody especially busybody bloggers could verify. Hansen apparently seems to be at it again only the part of the planet in question is different.

Many Americans probably believe that it was the temperature in the Eastern and Southern United States as well as Russia that are the climate chaos culprits. While they were indeed hot, they weren’t the fault. One place on the planet was just sizzling, well maybe just a little less chilly, the Arctic. The high Artic that is, specifically the area north of eighty degrees latitude, was according to GISS this June up to four degrees warmer than its long-term average.

The so-called normal global temperature for June is 59.9°F, but because of the high Artic heat it was 1.22° above or 61.1°F. It was so hot, that from space steam could be seen rising over the North Pole. It was so hot, that polar bears were seen sunning themselves on floating icebergs naked. Who knew they could just take off their fur coats.

What’s interesting is that there aren’t any thermometers there. That’s right in the high Arctic GISS just guesses. So, the warming is entirely fabricated. Now, there are lies. There are damn lies. There’s statistics. But in the advent of the computer age, there are computer algorithms that can lie at over a billion calculations a second. In the end as will be seen, a lie is a lie is a lie.

To determine the temperatures of the Arctic, GISS takes measured temperature data from lower latitudes. A mathematical method known as extrapolation can be used to determine values outside a known range. But GISS isn’t just guesstimating here. Instead it’s data manipulation to the extreme. They literally take it to the point of “ex-CRAP-olation.”

GISS smoothes the temperature data using a box that can be as much as 1,200 kilometers in length. Where there are more temperature stations, actual readings overlap, and the weight of any one station is averaged with others around it. So, the effect of any one station is mitigated.

But in areas where stations are sparse, i.e. the high Arctic, one thermometer can really skew the calculations. Using a 250 degree smoothing factor to generate the Arctic temperature “data,” the truth is shocking as well as appalling. GISS has very little actual data above 60 degrees and none above 80 degrees latitude. That four degree temperature Artic anomaly that’s driving this banner year of warming is based on data that simply doesn’t exist.

In fact, Hansen admits that Arctic warming is the main factor in driving global warming. One would think as a scientist he would want to verify that the estimated data was accurate by placing more temperature stations in the region, but Hansen has shown it only the result that counts not whether it’s real. It seems that the alarmists aren’t giving up their old tricks.

Incidentally, Artic ice over the last three years has been returning despite the “warming.” It’s probably because all that extra CO2 is somehow raising the freezing point of water. And while the Arctic ice is still below average, Antarctica’s has been way above normal. Wasn’t global warming supposed to melt both polar icecaps?