MPAA and RIAA Call for Copyright Police State

[nsane.forums]

The PRO-IP Act is a United States law that aims to toughen current anti-piracy measures.

As part of the Act, President Obama appointed Victoria Espinel as the new copyright czar last year. Espinel announced a public consultation a few months ago, looking for comments and suggestions from the U.S. public on how to deal with piracy.

For this consultation the RIAA and MPAA have now jointly submitted (pdf) their suggestions, calling for a future without piracy.

As expected, the submission starts with bitter complaints about the massive losses the entertainment industries have to endure because of online piracy. The same old bogus studies and reports are cited, publications that were heavily criticized and labeled as inaccurate by the U.S. Government earlier this week.

What follows are a set of recommendations that, if they become law, would turn the Internet into a copyright police state. The EFF has cherry picked some of the most draconian recommendations in a recent blog post, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. We highlight some of the suggestions below.

If the RIAA and MPAA had their way…

- The public would be encouraged to install anti-piracy software on their computers which would monitor their network for copyright-infringing materials. They are most likely referring to the Digital File Check application that they’ve been plugging for a while.

- Internet service providers would have to allow third parties to spy on the files that are transferred by their customers and check them against a reference database of “fingerprints” to check whether the files are infringing copyright or not.

- Torrent sites and file-hosters would have to preemptively filter content that is uploaded to or indexed by their sites. The reasoning behind this suggestion is that the regular notice and takedown procedures are time consuming and ineffective because content quickly reappears.

- Search engines, hosting companies, payment processors, advertising agencies, social networking sites and domain registrars would be encouraged to team up with copyright holders in order to prevent online piracy. The purpose of this collaboration would be to cut off sites that ‘facilitate’ copyright infringement.

- Consumers and websites that repeatedly infringe on the rights of copyright holders would lose their Internet access.

These are just a few of the recommendations that are listed in the submission. It is quite clear that the copyright industries want full control over the Internet by building a copyright police state. Let’s hope that the politicians responsible for drafting the legislation will use their brains, instead of blindly accepting such proposals.

Article from: TorrentFreak, in the morning.

View: Original Article

[CODYQX4]

Makes me wish they would all die in a fire. There will always be enough politicians dumb enough or on the payroll to pass BS like this.

I'd say the biggest thing on our side is that nobody in govt really feels like paying for implementing this and making it their job to babysit the internet looking for pirated MP3's, especially when they are busy enough looking for "terrorists".

[Bizarre™]

@CODYQX4:

Maybe they're looking for terrorists on the net too :P

[CODYQX4]

@CODYQX4:

Maybe they're looking for terrorists on the net too :P

Might as well at the way things are going. After all, US govt thinks illegal wiretapping is awwright!

I bet that Digital File Check app would screw people who rip their own CD's and not just pirated MP3's. If the media has to match a "fingerprint", say goodbye to backing up your music/movies.

But you deserve repetitive drop kicks to the head if you "willingly" install that crap, and KNOW full well what it does. They'll probably do a bundle like they do with Ask Toolbar and screw the less tech inclined and people who rush through their app installs (Trillian 4.2 beta tried to trick me into installing Xobni by using the accept/decline buttons, which I have never seen used for anything but EULA's, and you are supposed to press "Accept" or you can't install, but you have to click "Decline" not to install Xobni.")

[dMog]

Crap...now i have to turn myself in for singing happy birthday to my kid yesterday...i forgot to pay the royalties...