Remember when all hell was raised when then President Bush was hammered over the NSA warrantless surveillance program? Looks like Obama is taking it to another level.
This first article actually comes from Russia Today. The few American outlets covering this are not as direct reporting on this issue.
A not-so-private PC
The personal computer may soon be not-so-private, with the U.S. and some European nations working on laws allowing them access to search the content held on a person’s hard drive.
President Obama’s administration is keeping unusually tight-lipped on the details, which is raising concerns among computer users and liberty activists.
Almost everyone today owns a music player and a laptop. But what if the Government decided to allow itself to access these personal devices for no specific reason whatsoever?
In extreme secrecy from the public, the Obama administration is hammering out an international copyright treaty with several other countries and the European Union.
Under the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), governments will get sweeping new powers to search and seize material thought to be in breach of copyright.
While the Obama administration calls these secretive plans a development of “national security,” Richard Stallman, a prominent American software freedom activist, calls it a secret “war on sharing”
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Up until now, the breach of copyright has been a civil matter. The Obama administration seems to now want to criminalize it. (more…)
So now the Obama administration believes that copyrighted material is now an issue of national security? This next excerpt comes from Toronto’s TheStar.com
The proposed treaty has six main chapters: (1) Initial Provisions and Definitions (2) Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (3) International Co-operation (4) Enforcement Practices (5) Institutional Arrangements and (6) Final Provisions. In addition to drafting two “non-papers” that focus on institutional ACTA issues and procedural matters, Canada supplied the draft text for the Institutional Arrangements chapter at the most recent ACTA meeting in Paris in December.
Most of the discussion to date has centred on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights chapter, which is divided into four sections – civil enforcement, border measures, criminal enforcement and the Internet. The first three sections were addressed in meetings last year. Although there is still considerable disagreement on the final text, leaked documents indicate the draft includes increased damage awards, mandated information disclosure that could conflict with national privacy laws, as well as the right to block or detain goods at the border for up to one year.
Moreover, the criminal provisions go beyond clear cases of commercial infringement by including criminal sanctions such as potential imprisonment for “significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.”
Jail time for non-commercial infringement will generate considerable opposition, but it the Internet provisions are likely to prove the most controversial.
More related~
Copyright treaty is classified for ‘national security’
