ACTA - making a crime out of copyright infringement
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an international treaty under negotiation that will have far-reaching ramifications for how millions of internet users share copyrighted material online. It is a US-led initiative, with strong support from Japan. Other countries involved in the negotiations include the EU, South Korea, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, NZ and Australia. It has been estimated that this treaty will be made public by 2011 - and pressure will be placed on other countries to sign as part of future trade agreements.
Negotiations are top-secret for 'national security reasons' - yet the US trade representative has allowed certain interest groups to view the document. These include people from Google, eBay, Intel, Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, the MPAA and RIAA. Members of the public have largely been kept in the dark, apart from leaks online.
But what has been leaked is scary enough. This treaty is going to give the copyright holders the teeth to enforce copyright law, and internet service providers are going to be the watchdogs. To be considered a 'safe harbour' from prosecution, ISPs will be obliged to operate a three-strikes policy for alleged copyright infringement (no evidence required): two warnings, and then a ban for one year for that household. There is some speculation that ISPs will share lists of banned households, preventing people from subscribing to another ISP in the meantime.
One year is a pretty long time to go without the internet.
Michael Geist, a Canadian law professor at the University of Ottawa, provides a great summary of the dangers of ACTA in an interview on CBC's As It Happens.
He also has a 20min slide presentation that outlines the origins of ACTA, and where it is heading:
If ACTA is implemented, the internet will not be the same. Forget about watching music videos and film segments on YouTube. Forget about making fanvids and fanmixes. Forget about fansubs and scanlations. Forget about making screencaps for icons, website layouts, and lulz on image-hosting comms such as 4chan and fandomsecrets.
No more bittorrenting your favourite films, TV shows, anime. No more sharing of manga raws. And don't think you can hide on USEnet or IRC either. The groups providing these services will be subject to the same 'safe harbour' requirements too. When your country gets into bed with the US or other signatory states over trade, you too will have to comply with ACTA.
As for the grey area of fanfic and fanart, they may very well clamp down on that too. ACTA has redefined criminal copyright infringement to include significant wilful infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. So it no longer matters if your activities are not-for-profit. As far as ACTA is concerned, you are still committing a criminal offence - which means the government can come after you. (Actually, copyright infringement is already a criminal offence here - people have served jail time for sharing music online).
If ACTA does make it through to my country in 2011-2012, my fannish activities are over. I'll have to pull down my websites and all the copyright-infringing content on them. I'll have to remove my profiles on various forums and archives. I simply can't risk being an active online fan any longer.
Which, in the end, is what the major US media corporations, who have no doubt lobbied hard for the copyright provisions in ACTA, want of us all. They don't want fans who question and dissect and remix and rewrite without showing 'respect' for the original work. They prefer consumers who passively digest the prepackaged content that's tossed their way, and come back for seconds afterwards.
Nothing lasts forever.
This phrase describes it very nice what happened to the clan.
The DAK-clan was founded in the end of 2005, and it started gaming with the famous Call of Duty 2. A short modern war period with part 4 - named Modern Warfare - of the series was followed by Call of Duty 5 – World at War.
Actually not the newest release in the series is one active game in the clan: Call of Duty 7 – Black Ops rules our server as we skipped Part 6 - Modern Warfare 2.
Yes, you can trust your eyes, it is one active game. As every series has an end now one clan rule is changed. There is no more only one game in the clan, there will be two!
The great majority of the clan vote for two games (more than 2/3) and surprisingly the two games will be (with equal votes): Call of Duty Black Ops and
Battlefield 3.
As for the CoD servers there will be similar rules: Be friendly to other players, tolerate other players and play not only on your own as this is a team based game. Just as a short summary.
Additional we like to introduce our new server:
Servername: [DAK] Deutsches Afrika Korps
Server IP: 176.57.136.44:25200
Max. Player: 32
Welcome to all to our servers,
Your DAK-Clan.
Written by ---Doc--- on Friday 02/03/2012 - 14:20 CET last edit 02/03/2012 - 14:22 CET
In brief words some news from Battlefield 3.
1.) Up to now over 11,000,000 versions where sold. That means, BF3 is similar successful in 3 month as Bad Company 2 up to now. With theses numbers BF3 has 25% participation of the shooter market in the west hemisphere. This is of interest as MW3 was sold less than Black Ops.
2.) zh1nt0 (Community-Manager) announced a dlc for BF3 in spring.
3.) Battlelog update: Direct reconnect to same server if you lost the connection. Serverlist will contain server description and message from server.
Origin is still in beta phase so it will be updated from time to time.
As a problem occurred during the last update on my PC, I will make a news for the solution as it was a little bit tricky to found the reason. And the reason is unbelievable to me.
The error message from origin update or reinstall file (without de-installation) was (not word by word):
Can´t find plug-ins folder.
At least one (perhaps there are more) of the reasons is, that the temp folder was changed.
When I installed origin temp folders was defined in system settings as:
tmp = D:\tmp
temp = D:\temp
Later I changed both to D:\. Although no files are saved there (I am using a RAM-disk for temporary files which will be newly created after each reboot) this switch was the reason.
Remind this whenever origin makes problems during update.
Written by ---Doc--- on Monday 01/30/2012 - 18:14 CET
Cheaters are everywhere a problem. Companies try to remove them by different methods.
Dice adds now a report function.
That means:
"If you believe you have been the victim of outright cheating, the best way to report your concerns is to go to Battlelog, enter the profile page of the person you suspect and click the triangle in the top right corner of his name.
This will open up a window where you can describe to us at DICE what happened. Please enter as much detail as possible, describing what specifically makes you believe this player has used unfair methods, and preferably include a link to the Battle Report for the match in question.
These reports are then received by our analysts here at DICE who will do a deeper analysis of the situation and take appropriate action, including stats wiping and/or banning players who are confirmed as cheating."
Let´s wait and see if this will work and that no *peep*s make to much false reports. Fortunately every report will be checked manually.
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