Internet Tyranny: Are we powerless??

[IcSilk]

http://youtu.be/Zk3cIMAfMKs

This is crazy!! is there nothing that believers in freedom can do about this - besides petition the local fu-ckaticians in Washington? Is there no way to de-centralize the internet completely? Are we really at Washington's mercy?

I just don't understand how we can have this threat looming over us. Are there options or do we just have to suck it up?

[ua549]

That's a page out of the Chinese Guide to the Internet.

I'm certainly against copyright infringement, but the remedies must come from a judicial process, not supposition and innuendo on the part of a bureaucrat.

[IcSilk]

I'm certainly against copyright infringement, but the remedies must come from a judicial process, not supposition and innuendo on the part of a bureaucrat.

I really don't understand what your trying to say here UA. No disrespect at all and maybe because Im waaaaaay over tired or well heat stroked and mind melted at the moment, but Im not getting what you're getting at

[ua549]

Copyright enforcement must be via the court, not via some bureaucrat deciding that an IP/domain address is infringing on the intellectual property rights of someone else.

I don't know how to put it in simpler language.

[nihil]

Well, I am glad to see that your politicians are just as ignorant regarding IT and the internet as ours are.

The problem I see would be in letting IP owners apply for action without proof to the satisfaction of a court of law. To allow that would require a double edged sword such as.

Any corporation who submits an erroneous application shall pay a mandatory $10M to the aggrieved party or the actual losses if greater. All officers of the said corporation shall be deemed jointly and severally liable for this felony offence and serve 5years imprisonment without remission. Subsequently they will be disbarred from holding office in any corporation for the rest of their lives.

Over here, copyright infringement is the jurisdiction of the civil courts.

If you sell someone else's IP then it is theft or if it is hardcopy it is counterfeiting. Both are felony offences and are enforced by the unholy trinity of the Police, HM Customs and Revenue and the Trading Standards Office. The Crown Prosecution service (DA's Office) take it from there.

A perversity of British law is that the possession of counterfeit goods or IP is not of itself illegal, only the distribution or "making available" is.

So long as no payment is being received the remedy lies in a civil court, not a criminal one.

Whilst the taxpayer is rightly expected to fund the enforcement of criminal law, it is totally unreasonable to expect them to fund civil, commercial matters.

It is also unreasonable to expect the ISPs to police their traffic for copyrighted material. That would be to incur costs with no matching revenues.

And what about DRM? doesn't that encourage potentially legitimate customers to go for an unrestricted download or pirate copy?

A crude approach as this seems to be will probably fail. What you have to watch out for is the thin end of the wedge: "We will block websites that are distributing IP and are outside of US jurisdiction"............ that's the thin end........the thick end is to follow..................