Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Trans-Pacific Partnerships Gigantic threat to the internet.

This is my first post here, and I've decided to write about what I've been writing about on that

blog for the last few days, the secret treaty called the "Trans-Pacific Partnership", which will
 basically force US to adopt copyright laws so broad and corrupt that it will make SOPA look
nice.  Under the law, the ISP's are required to A) filter all communications looking for possible
or alledged infringement, and then they are forced to hand it over to the government. The
government would then look through it looking for possible infringement. The problem with
this is that the government can then say that this site needs to be taken down to google and
other similar sites, force ISPS to filter it out, and worse. No actual proof is required that the
transmission or site is actually infringing on something, just one infringing link, or the
assurance that the site contains lots of infringing links. Also temporary copy infringement, is 
not exempt to this. Everytime someone watches a video on youtube, 1000's of temporary 
copies are created by the streaming process. The ISP would be forced to use deep packet 
inspection to find these and if one of these temporary copies is a youtube packet that is part 
of a youtube video stream that has one "alleged" infringement on it, the person watching the 
video could get arrested, and sued, because the ISP is forced to tell the "alleged" copyright 
holder. The most recent RIAA case defendant had to pay $22,500 dollars per songs for 
illegally  downloading only 30 songs, each only 99 cents each... Imagine that multiplied by 
1000 for listening  to a video on youtube where video game footage is overlayed with 
copyrighted music, because of the  1000's of temporary copies produced on the persons
HDD, all caught by the ISP. That's $22,500,000  dollars for watching a video!


Under this, there is an almost certain chance youtube will be shut down. Youtube is filled with
infringing videos uploading copyrighted music. At least a few million.  But the other video types
uploaded to youtube, such as video game lets plays, walkthroughs, etc, could all be sources of
"alleged" infringement, due to the fact that many videos showing off games are put under fair
use, which TPP seems to be made to eliminate.  But even worse,  since the government simply
has to say a site is filled with infringing links, a lot of sites will be targeted under this. Expect all
the big file sharing hosts like 4shared, mediafire, etc to be shut down first. They have tons of
copyrighted material on them, and many people keep assuming they profit off pirated files
because they allow people to buy premium accounts for more upload space, even though the
pirated files are all tiny files, all tiny portions of an archive, split into 200 parts with 200 accounts
registered to upload a file. There is no way sites like this are profiting off of files uploaded to
their free account due to the fact that ads on these sites are part of every download, no
matter how legal.

But even worse, is the threat this poses to video game modding sites. Each modding
site for a game hosts at least one mod that borrows content from the game it mods, or 
another game. Since these modding sites are many times subsites of big community sites 
like planetquake, etc, which are hosted under a bigger site called "atomic gamer", bad 
things will happen when someone decides to give them (intentionally or not)
one false accusation of infringement and the whole thing (atomic gamer, ALL the 
Planet<insert name here>.com sites would all be shut down. That's about 75% of 
the big game fan  sites right there... Even worse, 3dgamers archive, which hosts 
mirrors to the idgames and  idgames2 ftp  servers, massive ftp sites hosting millions of 
Doom and Quake Addons, levels, mods,  editors,etc,  has at least one mod that borrows 
content. Imagine if  the supporters of this treaty, abuses it to take down both atomic 
gamer  and 3dgamers archive. You lose 99% of the downloads for video games under a 
fraudulent copyright claim, because TPP does not require proof, just a claim that the site 
has copyrighted links. It's scary what could be done under the TPP treaty, to stifle websites. 
Already soundcloud.com (a host for indie music), telefragged (the predecessor to 
atomic gamer),  and filefront (a file hosting site for video game mods, patches and demos)  
found there way to a  piracy site list set up by GroupM, a big music industry advertising 
service.  So they are already  targeting  game modding sites. Neither of these sites has 
infringing material  on it, at  least to my knowledge. This still does not cover all the sites that 
could be targeted under the TPP, add in Amazon mp3 services, internet radio, and indie music 
hosting sites,  all it takes is one copyrighted upload or one alleged copyrighted upload for the 
entire site to be  taken down... Scary...