Right now, the US and 8 other countries are all negotiating a secret treaty, the “trans-pacific partnership agreement” (or TPP) behind the backs of the congress that according to a recent leak, would force each country who ratifies this faux treaty to pass extreme draconian “copyright” laws that will make the government able to read private data gotten by ISPS and see what stuff among this could be copyright infringement, and without any proof, simply make one claim of infringing links, and then force the ISPs to shut down the persons net connection and tell the copyright holder the government claimed the transmission/site infringed on, then force google/etc to remove the sites in question and filter them out from search results, basically giving the gov’t free reign to shut down anything and give copyright holders free reign to make millions of money off of frivolous lawsuits. Even worse, infringement of “temporary” copies (like buffer copies of youtube videos) are considered infringement under this, and even not making any money off of said “infringement” makes a person liable for criminal infringement under this. So basically simply watching a youtube video could get you arrested under this for copyright infringement, because watching one video that is copyrighted puts 1000’s of temporary copies on your HDD and the ISPS would catch this and find you guilty of infringement due to “downloading illegal copies”. What trash….
I mentioned in one of my latest articles about TPP, how Megaupload was shut down and my files, all video game mods, not infringing in any way, were all deleted. It seems that TPP, which is being negotiated in secret in Leesburg VA, from SEP 6 to 15, could be used to shut down more sites like megaupload, which there are tons of…. And every single one is targeted by the copyright moguls as “piracy sites”, with claims of how each and everyone of these sites are profiting off of piracy, even though many of these sites have disclaimers that they are against piracy and will delete copyrighted files. And many of them do.
The Problem is that many of these sites have a “Premium” account that supports more file size for a price paid per month, usually from 30 to 100 dollars depending on the premium accounts size increase over the free account. Usually multiple premium account types exist with more of a price and more file size allowed. The problem is that none of the pirated files are uploaded to these premium accounts, at all. Pirates split their archives into 200 different copies all around 30 MB or so, to fit them on the free account, but to also make it so the person trying to illegally download them will have to download 200 files by clicking 200 links that all will open in new windows, why?
Pirate sites are almost always virus infected, the serious ones. And if they aren’t they require clicking on (virus filled) ad links that are to get access to the download links. The more time a pirated file downloader spends on the pirate site the more likely his PC will get infected to send out spam. The problem is that file upload sites like megaupload cannot possibly profit off of files uploaded to their free account. The ads found on these sites fill the sites and no matter how “legal” a file you are downloading is, you will still get ads. Their profiting off the ads, but the crazy allegation that megaupload and others are “profiting off piracy”, is BS, plain and simple. The pirates don’t even have to pay more money to host their files, and don’t even want to do that. They make their money off of Spam/Virus related crap, and don’t want to have to pay more money to upload.
Now onto megaupload’s takedown. I had perfectly legal files on that site, all video game mods I was distributing on a video game modding blog, none of them were infringing, yet the copyright moguls and the executive branch morons dare to take it down and possibly “investigate” my files? Since the megaupload take down and investigation was done in complete secrecy by morons in the executive branch who refuse multiple requests by EFF and others to return files to their legal owners, who didn’t infringe, I have no way of knowing if my files are among them…. They deserve the crap they get out of this, Simply uploading to any file uploading site puts us legal uploaders in the crosshairs… you use megaupload, you’re a pirate, it’s that simple, they all think that…
It’s no surprise, that simply uploading to one of these sites gets a “pirate crosshair” (suspicion of piracy) put on you, due to this article. A big industry advertiser, GroupM, sets up ads for the music industry on other sites, apparently, hiring others to do the real work involved (correct me If I am wrong). They posted a massive, thousands of entries long, list of sites they forbid advertising to, due to the sites being “pirate sites”. Surprise!!!!, every single fire hosting site you can think of is on this list, rapidshare, megaupload, zippyshare, filestube, dropbox (who has a policy against uploading copyrighted files), 4shared, sendspace, mediafire, and even worse, filefront, telefragged, and soundcloud!!!! All of them besides the last 3 have had some pirated files on them, and that’s only a reality of free file hosting sites, the more files get uploaded, the more likely someone will post something “infringing” or “allegedly infringing”.
The real issue is that filefront, a gaming file hosting site is on this list. Filefront has absolutely NO infringing files on it, by default it can’t… All it does is host game demos, mods, addon levels, patches, editing utilities, all legal files related to video games. Telefragged.com is a huge host for video game fan sites, all large in size, such as planetquake, any planet(instert game name here).com site, there are over 15 of them, planethalflife, planetdeusex, planetdoom, planet-you-name-it. Each one of these hosts dozens of dozens of other sites, many of them modding sites. Since modding involves distributing assets from the parent game with the mod to make it work, in certain cases, the chance that TPP will not be used to shut down one of these big sites is almost nonexistant. The infringing content on the mod site, really is on the big parent site, making that big parent site get taken down. Since that big parent site is really a subsite of telefragged.com, the request would move up the chain to telefragged, taking down ALL of these sites for copyright infringement under TPP, due to the “alledged” copyright infringement. Then comes sites like 3dgamers archives which host thousands of levels for many many games, totalling in the millions for all games combined, plus mods. You get the same problem. There is not a single game out there that doesn’t have one mod that re-destributes content from the parent game, getting all of 3dgamers archive shut down. There goes every single brilliant doom megawad ever made due to one claim of copyright infringement on the whole site based on one mod for some completely different games. This isn’t even factoring in mods that take stuff from other games, which are quite common. You add in that and you get an overwhelming guarantee that the site will get shut down due to a copyright complaint.
Then you have soundcloud, a place where indie artists share their music with fans. It allows downloads in mp3 format, and since many people stupidly assume that mp3 = must be pirated, it won’t be long before it gets shut down too. Like I said in the previous article, this could affect DOZENS of popular gaming, file upload, video sharing, indie music, and internet radio sites. The real problem is that GroupM either purposely or accidentally put telefragged.com, soundcloud.com, and filefront.com on their blacklist. I can’t see how these inclusions on their list can be an accident, with the exception of filefront, because many other sites on their list had file as their beginning, they thought filefront was just another megaupload. But that simply cannot explain why telefragged and soundcloud got on the list accidentally. In My honest opinion the fact telefragged and soundcloud are one there is proof, to me, that the copyright moguls are going after game modding sites and indie music sites as well as true infringement sites, to erroneously claim they are all infringing. They need laws like SOPA/TPP to do this because under TPP, the gov’t doesn’t need to list every infringing link separately, just simply say any site is filled with infringing links, without proof, to make it so the ISP is forced to shut down the person who made the site, from the net, and to force Google/etc to filter it out and take down the site.
If the threat the TPP poses to sites like this doesn’t scare you, then maybe the threat it poses to youtube and amazon might scare you even more. Either way, we have a law being forced down on the congress via a bogus treaty, that could be abused even more than SOPA could if it got passed, on a global scale, to take down many, many sites, for “alleged” copyright infringement. You could get every single site that the govt accuses of having infringing links on it, taken offline, their owners arrested and sued, all behind the copyright holders back, millions of millions of people being arrested and sued for merely watching youtube videos that have one thing the government says is copyright infringing, due to temporary copies being found on their hard drive by packet sniffing (deep packet inspection), which would be required to be done by ISPS to hunt for internet traffic that the government may find infringing, and all of this is being done behind the congresses back, the supreme court is being usurped, with no say on how constitutional this is, just for more money by copyright moguls? It isn’t right… Someone has to do some serious standing up to this. On openmedia.org there is a petition with over 100,000 signatures. If you think you could be affected by this, sign the petition. It’s being taken to the supporters at the next secret meeting in VA between Sep 6 and 15 as a protest by openmedia. Also make sure to visit eff’s page to click one button and tell your Rep’s and Senators how you feel about this. Send your own custom message to tell them how much of the internet is in danger from this, mentioning how innocent sites such as gaming, file hosting, video sharing, indie music, and internet radio sites could all be shut down under this law for merely being accused of infringement, without proof, and that temporary copies found on people computers when viewing a video could get them in trouble with the law for copyright infringement simply because the government claimed the video is infringing and that they were purposely downloading the temporary copies, just by one allegation!!! It’s important that citizens stand up to this and use the government rights to tell our congressmen we have to protest crap like this. If there is no fight, this will pass. Do you really want to be sued for $22,500,000 for simply watching a video? It could happen to you if you don’t take part in this. It’s a scary world, and it only gets scarier.
Sites that could be effected by this (printed out in each of the articles I write on TPP)
Amazon
Youtube
Facebook
Moddb
Itunes
3dgamers archive
ANY and All of the following gaming sites:
Seriously
Duke4ever
Doomworld
TESNexus
Doom3world
Fallout3nexus
Planethalflife
Func-Messgboard (look it up)
Quaddicted
Unrealsp.org
Beyondunreal.com
Payne Reactor
Planet Deus Ex
The Admirals Command Chamber
Tenfourmaps.telefragged.com
Underworldfans quake review site
Darkplaces
Zdoom.org
Gzdoom website
D2x-xl
Kmquake2
Prboomplus
Doom Legacy
DarkXL
DukePlus
Eduke32 website
Reverbnation
Purevolume
Soundcloud
4Shared
Myspace Music
Myspace
4Shared
Dropbox
FileFront/Gamefront
Atomic Gamer
Rapidshare
4Filehosting.com
Completegamer.net
Mediafire.com
Sendspace.com
Vimeo.com
Zippyshare.com
Blogspot
Wordpress
Related articles
- Enter Sopa X10 – The TPP, and Why it should be stopped (erosionoffreedom.wordpress.com)
- Trans-pacific Partnership’s corruption exposed….. (erosionoffreedom.wordpress.com)
- TPP’s threat to streaming video/music, and what we can do about it… (erosionoffreedom.wordpress.com)
- MediaFire with 50 Gigabyte free cloud storage, desktop client (ghacks.net)
- What Google’s New Stance on Copyright Infringement Means to Your Business (news.terra.com)