PRO-IP And You: What You Need To Know And Fear From This New Law in America
Monday 13 October 2008 @ 9:29 pm | By Ben 'FBINinja' Schmidt 13 Comments
George W. Bush, the ever friendly and intelligent man that he is, signed into effect the PRO-IP act, Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, for those who want to know what that stands for.
Now, the reason you need to fear this is because the RIAA, and the MPAA are having a massive party right now, seriously its a 10 kegger, everyone is invited, but you. In fact they decided to just throw beer at you, I mean what else can they do to the common citizen.
What this means: The PRO-IP act creates a new position on the cabinet, one guy who (as like to officially dub him “The Real Final Boss of the Internet” kinda like Ozma, ok I’m done joking around here for a bit.) is in charge of increasing intellectual property enforcement. What is an intellectual property you ask? Well let me break it down for you.
Works: This is the fancy term they will use from now on for anything that can and will be copyrighted in the media.
A ‘work’ is; every individual picture in a magazine, every article in a magazine, every song file in a cd, every movie, every game, every TV show.
Now you say, “well we kinda knew that already” but lets break it down a bit here, say they have a soundtrack in a game or a movie/TV show. Those are counted as separate works, so if you downloaded a game, you get nailed for the game itself, and every song file and anything else they find in there as well.
Now here’s the best part of this law. They decided that it was alright for anyone with reasonable suspicion in the government with that particular power to walk into your house and just take every electronic any illegal file might have touched, the router, your xbox, televisions, computer, any other computer that they think it might have had contact with, your mp3 player, your camera, your cellphone, and pretty much anything they think is cool looking.
Say you download a video, or have a video of a youtube video that had pirated music in your temporary Internet files or cache….LOOK OUT FOR THE RAPE TRAIN. Yep, they basically are using the “zombie virus infection rule” anything that “infected work” touches needs to be taken out.
Then if that wasn’t bad enough, they will fine you for each ‘work’ they find on your computer as well.
Now, here’s the best part for the RIAA, say you only downloaded an old game or something that the game developers don’t care about anymore, they say, “well lets just forget it” the RIAA can come in and take that case and force them to sue you depending on the music content.
This law was just signed in today, so I’m sure the hunt is on already, don’t let your guard down!
So uh, nahu, you got an empty room for me in Mexico?
If You Liked This... Share It!
Or share it by email or anywhere else with
Loading ...
Abraham 'Velcor' Duarte
David 'KidKobun' Bruno
Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano
Random J
Sol
I am so sick of this country.
This sounds like tinfoil hatting, but I wouldn’t put anything past the RIAA.
The RIAA also rule over japanese music? I am at loss at this.
Well written article… this is certainly food for thought.
Taco has worded this almost perfectly within a single sentence.
We all know shit like this has been going on for month, hell even years now, but they just upped the ante for how many charges they can press against you. Plus we know how malicious the RIAA have been to anyone and everyone in the past.
Soon enough they’ll probably start trying to find a way to make you haul ass to jail for specific lines of code within the files.
Well luckily “the PRO-IP Act hasn’t been signed by the President yet, and [sic](with the looming economic crisis) may very well be ignored until the new President is sworn into office in January.”
I agree that this gives the enforcement czar way too much power, but the penalties are too severe and the likelihood of consumer groups getting all over this, ACLU, if and when a person is taken to court is high.
Outside of all of this PROTECT YOURSELF. Secure your IP address and block traffic that calls home.
Update * as Nahu pointed out to me, law went into effect, signed by W.
Edit: I’m getting different information on the law. Either way it is on the president’s desk.
Uh-oh times a-runnin’ out.
Better make a few quick changes to speed this process up a bit…
Settings > Preferences > Options > Max. Number of Simultaneous DL Tasks:
70
Max. Upload Rate Per Task:
2kb.
Ok we should be good to go.
Get it while you can boys!
Ok
FBI has the right idea. See you in a week, Nahu. This country has officially gone to the dogs. And by dogs i mean money hungry lawyers.
i’ve been talking to people about it at work, and there are a lot of people who don’t know about this, but when they do hear about it they become outraged that something like this is happening. Why should i feel afraid to browse the internet or do anything on my computer, ever? I’m definitely writing to someone about this.
The USA is also the only country that allows patents of ideas- not the literal manifestation of that idea, such as say, the page up key, but the idea itself.
Eep! Scary.