Liberty

ACTA: What Is This Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?

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ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is something you will probably not hear much about. Maybe a small general item at the end of the news. Chances are the tabloids will not mention it at all and it’s unlikely to be promoted to front page headlines in any broadsheet newspaper. But believe me, ACTA is something that will affect every man, woman and child using the internet right now. And not in a good way. Just when we thought the US government’s freedom-limiting legislation SOPA and PIPA had been dealt potential fatal body blows, ACTA threatens to slip in through the back door.

What Is ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) Anyway?

In broad terms, ACTA is an international agreement drawn up in secret by a strange hodge-podge of countries led by the USA (who else?), the European Union, South Korea, Singapore, Morocco, New Zealand and Canada. It has been heavily lobbied for around the world by the big drug, music and movie corporations and has attracted much hostility from the majority of legitimate pro-freedom groups, who consider it a dangerous threat to the internet. It’s primary stated aim is to “create international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement”. The title of the treaty might suggest that it primarily deals with counterfeit goods but in reality it has far broader scope and that’s where it gets tricky.

What most people have against ACTA is that it takes counterfeiting and piracy and makes them the same thing, much in the same way that the Christian Right in the USA talk of Communists and sexual deviants in the same breath. Two different enemies made one. (In my limited experience, it’s the right-wingers who are more likely to be sexually deviant: you almost expect neo-Nazis to keep a stash of chains, whips and gimp-masks in the garage.) But I digress…

With ACTA, the twin stated enemies are counterfeiters and pirates. But how can it be right that the owners of an organised and well-funded factory in Mexico (for example), pumping out thousands of illicit copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster DVD or top-selling rock CD should be treated practically the same as a teenager in Perivale illicitly sharing an Amy Winehouse track?

Furthermore, ACTA authorizes the signing governments to penalise the ISPs – Internet Service Providers such as BT, Virgin and so on – for the actions of their clients. So, if I use my broadband connection to distribute pirated movies, BT can be taken to court. That’s like the local council being fined when drug dealers use their highways to transport heroin. So, obviously the ISPs are going to start snooping to see what we are up to and almost certainly limiting our access to the internet. According to the Free Software Foundation, ACTA would require ISPs not to host free software that can access copyrighted media, and it would no longer be legal for DRM-protected media to be playable with free or open source software.

ACTA’s supporters include all the big movie, drug and record corporations, including News Corporation, Viacom, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Monsanto, Time Warner, Universal, Sony, Verizon, Walt Disney, and the Motion Picture Association of America. These are multinational corporations who are struggling to come to terms with modern life. Throughout history Big Business has been scared of new technology and has proved unable to adapt. Remember when IBM was the biggest thing in computing? And when Phillips had the whole cassette tape market sewn up?

Think back, if you’re old enough, to when photocopiers began to be commercially available to small businesses? Publishing companies tried to get them banned and at the very least metered so that they’d get a rake-off for every copy made, a “tax” still in force in many libraries around the world. Today, even though anyone can buy a new colour photocopier/ scanner/ printer from Amazon for less than £25, no sane person buys one in order to copy books they’ve borrowed for free from the library. Epson Stylus SX130 Compact All-in-One Printer (Print, Copy and Scan)  For one thing, it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s while because the cost of the materials would be approaching the retail price of the book you were making.

Remember the campaign from the music industry in the 1980s-1990s that made “home recording is killing live music” the mantra you saw every time you opened up the NME or put on a record? Well, it didn’t. What really began the death-knell for the record industry was them selling CDS that cost less than a pound to produce for upwards of £15 – and that was 10-15 years ago, the equivalent to £50-£60 in today’s currency. Greed and the inability to adapt to the modern way of life is doing for the record industry and will probably do for the major movie and pharmaceutical corporations too. It’s just a matter of time.

If the big drug companies were not pricing vital life-saving drugs out of the reach of the Third World and trying to ban generic treatments (by sledgehammer methods like ACTA), would anyone bother counterfeiting them? If Nike or Dr Martin sold their footware at prices close to what they cost to produce and not with mark-ups of 2,500 per cent and more profit, would they have a counterfeiting problem? That the top movie and rock stars are paid millions of dollars (it’s usually dollars), proves that there’s still plenty of money sloshing around. Instead of stopping teenagers from swapping their music, the music industry would be better served employing them to scrap their current business plans and working out something that will work in the Internet Age.

Nobody condones counterfeiting, which generally involves passing off inferior goods as the real thing. This is especially true of life-saving drugs. The very nature of counterfeiting involves the end-user being deceived as to the origin of what they are buying. Piracy is different. When a product is pirated, the consumer is usually aware that they are bypassing legal channels – and they don’t usually give two hoots. Although the law says differently, most people believe that when they buy a CD or DVD (usually for a relatively large amount of money), it becomes their property and if they want to run off a copy for a mate, they should be able to. ACTA would make them criminals liable to a major penalty.

ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) Poses A Real Problem For All Of Us

As the French campaigning website La Quadrature du Net states: “ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet companies. In the name of trademarks and patents, it would also hamper access to generic medicines in poor countries.” Their spokesman Jérémie Zimmermann elaborates: “This element of language is known to us as part of the vocabulary of the ‘copyright Talibans’, as we call it. If you treat Chinese manufacturers who create counterfeit DVDs or medicines in the same way you treat individuals sharing not-for-profit in their homes you know that you will have problems.” Click for more about ACTA at La Quadrature du Net.

ACTA is a backdoor way for government and global corporations to restrict the internet and our freedoms. It’s up to us to resist it as forcefully as we can. Just don’t expect the media – who have a vested interest in controlling piracy – to keep you informed.

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Top Conspiracy Theories

Top Conspiracy Theories

Top conspiracy theories? How a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory gets the “top” tag is interesting enough in itself. Just what makes one conspiracy theory better than all the rest?

Can it be because it is true (surely some of them must be, just according to the law of averages?), or maybe because it is totally outrageous, along the lines of: the Queen is a lizard; 9-11 was an inside job engineered by US government agencies; and Jimmy Savile was a peodophile? Being totally bizarre and true would seem to be a desirable double whammy and there are plenty of people who say that all those examples are 100% correct. That’s why I’ve included two of them in my list of Top Conspiracy Theories.

The Jimmy Savile allegations became an candidate for Top Conspiracy Theory (well, maybe not Top Conspiracy Theory), after it was revealed that a well-researched and ready to air BBC Newsnight piece on allegations that the British DJ and charity marathon-runner had molested schoolgirls at a school at which he had volunteered to do “charity work” in the 1970s, was shelved at the last minute on orders from a very senior executive. This was in mid-December  2011. A fawning tribute featuring Shane Ritchie was aired on BBC-1 on December 26th. The internet is saturated with reports that Savile used his charity and volunteer work as a cover for more illicit activities, including necrophilia, underage sex and procuring male children for former British Prime Minister Ted Heath to “play with” on his yacht, Morning Cloud.

I don’t know the truth of any of these specific allegations, but I once spoke to a woman who said she’d had “semi-consensual” sex with Savile when she was fifteen, and that the police have investigated similar claims on at least two publicly-documented occasions. Savile’s supporters deny any wrong-doing on the part of the tracksuit-wearing DJ (“Now then, now then…”), admitting that he was a bit of an oddball but adding that he did raise a lot of money for charity. If you want to find out more about the Anti-Sir Jimmy Savile point of view – bearing in mind that he is in no position to answer back – then you can check out David Icke’s forum (which is dedicated to “free speech”), and perhaps take a peek at this extract from an ITV documentary on the Nolan Sisters made in 2009: Top Conspiracy Theories – click here to view.

My Top Conspiracy Theories:

The Queen (And Most Other World Rulers) Is A Lizard

When it comes to Top Conspiracy Theories, this one is a “humdinger” and potentially the biggest of them all. The writer and former BBC football reporter and Green Party spokesman, David Icke, has devoted his life since 1991 to telling us about an ancient race from the Middle East – via Outer Space – that now runs the world. Icke refers to them as the “Babylonian Brotherhood.” Key Brotherhood bloodlines include the British Royal Family (The House of Windsor) and the allied Royal families of Europe, the Rockerfellers, the Rothschilds, and the establishment families of the USA, including the Kennedy clan and the Bush family. Among the organizations and bodies  the Brotherhood created and now control are the Illuminati, Round Table, the Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the United Nations, and the Internet. The members of the Brotherhood are descended from reptile-like creatures who arrived from Outer Space a few thousand years ago, hence “The Queen Is A Lizard” jibe.

The basis of Icke’s theories is that the “few ” have created a series of secret societies that rule the world and control the “many”. The Brotherhood are dedicated to their “Great Work of Ages” of world domination and the eventual goal of a population that is micro-chipped in order to control us. Icke has been almost universally ridiculed for his theories, but individual research by the likes of British journalist Jon Ronson show that certain aspects of his claims do have substance. I find it impossible to take on board most of David Icke’s ideas, but I find aspects of them get less bizarre with every passing year. Who knows, maybe the Queen is a lizard?

Top Of All Top Conspiracy Theories: 9-11 Was An Inside Job

Maybe not as implausible as I first thought. After checking out a few of the “facts” and a few of the conspiracy theory websites, the official version – that Osama Bin Laden orchestrated this from a cave in Afghanistan – sounds less likely than many of the versions peddled online. The general consensus among conspirators is that 9-11 was orchestrated by the US Government, or possibly the Babylonian Brotherhood, as an excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. They say that only the CIA and other US government agencies had the facilities and expertise to pull off such a major coup.

Much is made of the New York firefighter’s reaction to the way the Twin Towers collapsed and various architects have said that the buildings would not have reacted as they appeared to as the result of a fire after being hit by a plane. Many experts and people who should know have said that the collapses had more of the look a controlled demolition rather than of a structural failure after being engulfed by fire.

Here’s a film made in 2006 by “MI5 whistle-blower” (as he seems destined to forever be called) David Shayler, that covers much of this, with an emphasis on Britain’s involvement and its own terrorist attacks on the 7/7 London Bombings:

It seems to me that the official version is even more far-fetched than the conspiracy theory. This is what we are expected to believe: 20 Arab hijackers decide to hijack a bunch of planes and crash them into prominent US buildings, but one hijacker gets arrested before he is able to start his job. The FBI seizes his laptop but decide not to do anything with it until their superiors give them permission. In the meantime, the remaining nineteen terrorists are allowed to board four planes, despite the fact that several of them were under FBI surveillance and on “no fly” lists.

After managing to get on board the aircraft, the unarmed terrorists were then able to overthrow ex-military pilots as well as an Israeli anti hijacking agent (who just happened to be on board one of the planes), and seize control of all four. They then were able to fly them off course for long periods of times, seemingly unnoticed by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), even though one of the planes managed to get out a call saying that the plane had been hijacked and that a passenger had been shot. Then these guys, who it was “revealed” had been given barely enough flying lessons to take off and land, had flown those planes into buildings at high speeds and after performing several difficult turns, dives and other manoeuvres. This then caused robustly-built steel-framed buildings to collapse after being set on fire many floors above the ground.

Sounds to me like something only the descendent of reptiles from Outer Space could dream up. Top Conspiracy Theories? You bet your sweet ass…

 

 

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BBC = Brainwashing British Citizens

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I would stress that I do not share the sentiments of the headline. It comes from an online forum dedicated to exposing the BBC’s “left-wing bias”. Because of my own left-wing bias, I won’t be naming it or providing a link. Their other suggestions for what BBC stands for include “Big Brother Coverage” and “Blatantly Biased Corruption”.

The moderator, Teddy Bear, and his rabid chums cite examples of how the BBC is mounting a virtual Communist attack on Good Old Blighty, financed by the unwitting licence-payer. It won’t surprise you to learn that the most quoted sources of “evidence” are ‘The Sun’, ‘Mail On Sunday’ and ‘Daily Telegraph’.

These part-time Beeb-bashers – as opposed to full-time Beeb-bashers like Rupert Murdoch and the owners of the Mail group of “newspapers” – see the BBC as an ultra radical organisation that’s on the side of the extreme left, Islamic militants, the European Union, and on a crusade to replace experienced broadcasters with unkempt yoof.

Examples include how back in the 1980s, Dr Who was nothing more than  a thinly disguised attack on the Thatcher government (proof: “a spin-off Doctor Who children’s novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, which was published under licence by the BBC in 1987, featured a despotic villain called Rehctaht – Thatcher spelt backwards”); that the Archers is a hotbed of radicalism (“During the first Countryside March, the Archers managed not to mention it at all, but mentioned the Gay Pride March instead”); that only pro-EU propaganda makes BBC news; and getting rid of jazz programmes on Radio 2 in favour of “soft rock”: “Only a few days since a Newsnight editor attacks the BBC for their ageist and youth obsessed policies – a Radio 2 presenter has quit and done the same.”
Most sinister of all is their belief that the BBC is pro-Islamic and anti-Christian. A whole thread on this theme is illustrated by a BBC logo in which the “C” becomes an Islamic crescent. Here are a couple of examples:

“How is it The Telegraph with resources far less than the BBC is able to cover this story from Bangladesh (“Rape victim receives 101 lashes for becoming pregnant”), yet no mention of it on the BBC site? Can it be that the BBC prefers to hide stories that show the real depraved mentality of these extremist Sharia law Muslim states? Of course it is! Same as it has done with the numerous other similar type stories mentioned on this forum, and the many many more covered by Jihad Watch or Religion of Peace.
“Is there really any doubt about the insidious immoral nature of the BBC?”

“Why is it that whenever a Palestinian is supposedly shot or killed by Israeli troops, and certainly when by an Israeli civilian, it receives instant headline status on the BBC website, but when, as in this case, a Christian is murdered in Pakistan by Muslims for refusing to convert, there’s not even a mention of it?
“This is not a rhetorical question – How do YOU explain it?
“If you really want a glimpse of how many atrocities are committed globally by extremist or fundamental Islamics without any mention on the BBC website, check out this site. See if after you have any doubt about the bias of the BBC in this domain.”

You’d think that Teddy Bear and his crew could be dismissed as part of a lunatic fringe, but it seems that a significant number of Brits feel the same way. Newspapers bash on about it endlessly and there are dozens of similar websites. A quick Google search for “BBC bias” came up with 1,500,000 hits.

Through reading their comments, you can build up a profile of who these people are. Almost without exception they are white, middle-class, middle-aged  – or older – Tory Christians. (A significant number appear to like Trad Jazz and fancy Joan Bakewell). What their house newspaper (“The Daily Mail”) likes to call The Silent Majority.

Although members of the Silent Majority tend to do very-nicely-thank you, they and their mouth-pieces like to paint themselves as victims. Victims of the loony left local councils who won’t let them call rubbish sacks “black bags” any more, and who have seemingly turned “man-hole covers” into “person-hole covers”. These are people who actually say “It’s political correctness gone mad!” with no sense of irony.

They see themselves as victims of a mass immigration that’s threatening to overwhelm their tiny homeland and change our way of life forever. Of “bogus asylum-seekers” (sic) who are either taking our British jobs or else scrounging off the dole… depending on what the angle is.

Most of all, they are victims of a left-wing BBC who continually pumps Socialist propaganda into all our homes. “And what I object to most of all,” foams one correspondent, “is that I’m paying for it through stealth lefty tax”. Or what sane people call the BBC Licence Fee.

I can’t help but be amazed that these people really do think that those in charge of the BBC (the “commissars”, as they are often termed!), really do have a secret agenda. That they meet in their marbled halls to scheme new ways to corrupt our naturally-Thatcherite white-skinned nation with their left-wing filth.

Of course, the reality is that the BBC is run by predominantly middle-class, middle-aged white people. The staff and freelance payrolls are made up of thousands of individuals: Labour-voters, Lib-Dems, Greens, SWP, UKIPs – maybe even a few Tories. I’ll bet that a few of them don’t possess strong political views at all.

The BBC Licence Fee is a bargain. For £139 a year (a smidgeon over £2.67 a week), I get access to six television channels and a mass of radio stations. When compared to what Sky satellite TV costs or the daily cost of “The Mail”, it’s a double-bargain. Don’t tell anybody, but I’d gladly pay £2.67 a week just for BBC Radio 4, BBC 4 TV and BBC 6 Music alone.

I don’t listen to Radio One very often, if at all. The same goes for BBC3, Eastenders, National Lottery Live, Strictly Come Dancing, Women’s Hour, Moneybox Live, The Eurovision Song Contest, BBC Radio London, The Organist Entertains, BBC 5 Live, and a whole load more. But do I think they should be banned and taken off the air? Do I heckers like.

The Silent Majority, on the other hand, only considers the negative. To them, it’s all about what they don’t like. How terrible that their licence fee goes to fund the lifestyle of some lefty comedian or long-haired radio DJ. The SMs insist that everything should be how they want it. Anything that’s not to their taste must be eradicated. The scary thing is, politicians of all persuasions now feel that they have to cosy up to them. Even the BBC concedes more and more to their demands.

The Jonathan Ross/ Russell Brand “debacle” is a case in point. People who listened to the programme as it went out didn’t think to object to what they heard, but once the ‘Mail On Sunday’ had highlighted the issue, a week later, hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t know Russell Brand from Russell Grant, suddenly decided that he and Jonathan Ross should lose their jobs. Now they’ve both gone, and the BBC is poorer as a result.

Anyone with half a brain can see that the BBC isn’t overtly left-wing or pro-Islamic Fundamentalist. I don’t remember a BBC announcer ever suggesting we assassinate a Tory MP, or ‘Eastenders’ hatching a storyline involved with bringing down the financial establishment. Very few sitcoms centre around the desire for Sharia Law and you’ll hear more about “saving our bangers” and how crazy the EU is than how we must join the Euro-Zone.

Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme, often cited by ‘The Silent Majority’ as a hotbed of socialism, spends a good quarter of its air-time on Business News. This involves financial moguls and City barrow-boys celebrating capitalism and denouncing the likes of the Minimum Wage, paid maternity leave and the prospect of tax rises. My leftwing perspective is that the rest of the programme seems to consist of interviewers sneering at the naivety of Labour politicians and not interrupting Tory toffs half as much as they deserve.

But that’s just my view. I don’t advocate sacking John Humphrys or Evan Davies or dismantling the BBC. I might shoot off an email giving my views, but my ultimate sanction is the “off” button. I’ll just stop listening.

I wish the Silent Majority would shut the fcuk up.

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Censorship: The Compelling Case

I hate censors. Especially the self-appointed rag-bag of philistine dim-wits who constantly picket the broadcasting authorities, complaining about stuff they’d be better off not watching. My message to them is “Switch off!”

In a civilised society that would be the end of it, but these people are working on an agenda and they are backed by sections of the media who would love to see the BBC toppled. Although the talents of these complainers are distinctly limited, and their collective artistry woeful, they set themselves up as judges and arbiters of what the rest of us can see and hear. These morons would feel no embarrassment in asking Michaelangelo to cover up David’s genitals, Botticelli to banish his bottoms or Chaucer to omit the sauciness from the Canterbury Tales.

The lead letter in our “local” newspaper, the scarily-rightwing News Shopper (you can certainly shop around and get better local news), is a rant from one Miranda Suit (“Address supplied”) headlined “Take bad language off our TV screens”. It speaks of the “controversy surrounding the obscene telephone messages made to Andrew Sachs by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross” and goes on to urge that we sign a petition to the Prime Minister, “an opportunity for everyone to make a real difference and benefit society.”

This same Miranda Suit turns out to be a leading light in Media March, a Christian protest group with links to mediawatch-uk, the successor to Mary Whitehouse’s Viewers & Listeners’ Association. In 2004 Ms Suit was quoted on the BBC website as saying: “We do need swear words, they are a useful expression of anger, but they need to be used sparingly. The only real swear word there is now is the c-word, and we don’t want that to become normalised. If people have no swear words left, who knows – they might not be able to express their anger and might end up hitting someone.”

She seems to have changed her views since then. Perhaps God told her she was being too liberal; who knows. The Media March website features a letter currently being sent by supporters to the BBC Chairman, which includes the chilling line: “However, while there is much to be justly proud of, the BBC is still not listening to me in a number of important areas.”

I’ve got news for you, Miranda… they’re not listening to me, either.

The letter goes on: “I strongly object to my licence fee being used to fund the following” and lists many of the usual suspects, including “vulgar ‘celebrity’ presenters, obsessed with sex, bad language and insulting behaviour, who are paid millions of pounds in salaries” and “Sleazy, violent soap storylines”, plus:

  • Expansion of digital channels and services
  • Programmes that can be downloaded from the internet by non-licence fee payers for free
  • Continued depictions of violence, sex, bad language, drug taking, etc. which can in no way be described as appropriate for a public service broadcaster

If put into practice, this last objection would mean an end to dramas such as Casualty, which is fuelled by violence and drug-taking. Is Ms Suit and her followers suggesting that violence, bad language and drug taking are not features of life in Britain today? If that’s the case, she should go out more.

The main worry here is that the BBC is on the defensive. Its capitulation in the face of a few thousand people who protested at the Brand/ Ross affair was pathetic. Claims that 40,000 protested is rubbish: this includes thousands and thousands of people like me who voiced support for Brand and Ross and whose contribution was treated as if we had been on the reverse of the argument. Even if you count the entire 40,000 as being against the foul-mouthed duo, it’s not even 0.07% of the UK population of 60,943,912.

And yet things have changed. Even minor swearwords are banned on the BBC and anything regarded as vaguely offensive is now strictly verboeten. Although I don’t advocate the use of the “C” and “F” words on CBBC, there is such a thing as a 9pm watershed and after that it should be purely a matter of artistic control.

I do not have huge confidence that BBC Director General Mark Thompson is the man suited to be the final arbiter in such matters. He was educated by Jesuits and, according to Wikipedia, worships at a Catholic church near Oxford, which hardly makes him impartial deciding events that may send his soul to eternal damnation! Plus, his background in TV is purely factual – Watchdog, Breakfast Time, Panorama, Newsnight – and so he may not always be on the side of art… especially with Old Nick prodding him in the arse with a toasting fork.

Why can’t dominating idiots like Miranda Suit stick to watching the Disney Channel and leave the rest of us to watch what we want– be it Storyville on BBC 4 or Celebrity Arse-Wiggling on Bravo? I may not personally choose to watch Celebrity Arse-Wiggling on Bravo but I’ll defend your right to watch it – provided it’s on after the watershed, of course.

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