Despite the government having released a report just yesterday that painted the claims by the entertainment industries of lost revenue as flat out lies; today they are trying to push the Obama administration to give them a Carte Blanche to destroy your freedoms.
Torrentfreak has an excellent article on the reccomendations, connected to the Pro-IP act that passed earlier this year, which as a result Obama placed a Copyright Czar in place in order to oversee all attempts to stop piracy.
The Czar, Victor Espinel asked for recommendations from everyone and the RIAA and MPAA produced their own.
Some of the reccomendations made by the MAFIAA include:
- 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.
Similiar to the Three Strike law currently being touted to Obama.
Emanuel, the brother of US presidential adviser Rahm, said the industry was talking to the US government in a bid to introduce a "three strikes and you're out" law to govern illegal downloading.
"We are in the midst of talking to the president and some attorney generals and [we are] trying to implement a three strikes and you're out rule," he added.
Similar to the provisions in the Anti-Counterfeit-Trade-Agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors between several nations, these proposed laws seem to care nothing about the consumer's or common citizen and intend to most likely only expand the current police state. Look forward to a future where not only innocent peace loving pot smokers are in prison, but anyone caught downloading a mp3.