Go A & B, stick it to the yanquis
WTO ruling emboldens pirates of the Caribbean
Antigua and Barbuda, the small Caribbean nation perhaps best-known as the birthplace of cricketer Sir Vivian Richards, has won concessions from the World Trade Organisation that will allow it to suspend some of its intellectual property obligations. The island nation has arrived in this position after fighting against the USA’ …
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 13:14 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: >stick it to the yanquis
Yes, but severing any such link deliberately, would be no doubt unlawful and probably in breach of several international treaties.
It's nice to see Uncle Sam being told to stop bullying the other countries for a change, whatever my personal beliefs about internet gambling sites (i.e. a very good thing for the owners and a very bad thing for the users), they have eseentially been told that if they don't uphold their side of a treaty, the other party can happily disregard their side, until Uncle S comes to his senses again.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 03:51 GMT STrRedWolf
If this goes through, this means:
Pirate Bay, bullet-proof hosting services, and even Mega will land mirrors on their networks.
Internet connectivity gets upgraded ASAP.
The media companies start bribing heavily enough to cause military action.
A&B get nuked.
World War 3.
I'd move to Germany but they're even worse than the US.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 07:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why nuke
Just de-peer them. Or to be more exact send two suits with dark glasses to their ISP provider asking "politely" to de-peer them or be on the receiving end of RICO + DMCA + whatever else USA can come up with to protect the monopoly of their state lotteries and other forms of legalized gambling.
Do not underestimate the power of the lobbies in this area. This includes A, B and other Caribean countries lobbies too. They have been highly successful in financing the right voices in the right places so that the hugely disproportional sanctions against Cuba are still in place. As long as Cuba is not trading with the US its cittizenship and economy is not "corrupted" and it stays "red". As long as it stays red, all the gambling and tourism goes elsewhere in the Caribean. Win, win. At the expense of the Cubans but c'est la vie.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 07:17 GMT JaitcH
The USA is dithering on its response to that claim.
Joe Biden is potentially running for president and this means he needs money.
He is already in the pocket of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), so undoubtedly there will be conditional agreements for support being discussed.
As for cutting communications inks to Antigua and Barbuda, the US will likely run into the ITU who don't really agree to that sort of thing. Cuba's connections for years were routed through a sea cable to Miami where most everyone could get connected to Cuba.
Smart Canadians set up 'Call Cuba' businesses whereby American could call into Canada and get connected to Cuba, beating the stupid ban.
Cuba is also linked to South American networks through cables and can always fall back on satellite links.
Up yours, USA.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 20:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The real pirates ...
As an American, I find the constant screams of "You want to run the world!" somewhat bizarre; if those who yell about it so loudly lived here, they'd be aware that the US would generally prefer to not be involved with anybody else whatsoever. Isolationism is more a fault of ours than imperialism.
Of course, if we are imperialists, don't get too high on your horses, Britain - we learned from the best.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 23:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The real pirates ...
> Of course, if we are imperialists, don't get too high on your horses, Britain - we learned from the best.
Sadly, I rather fear that the US has merely *copied* from the best, not *learned*. If you had learned from our mistakes (or stupidity, or arrogance) then your foreign policy would look quite different.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 08:48 GMT The Nazz
Let's hope they price the "goods" appropriately.
After reading recently that Antigua and Barbuda can take this action until they have "recovered" the value of $3bn or so, let's hope that they price the "IP goods" at a reasonable rate.
Hmmmm, let's say $0.00001 per track and $0.00010 per film. That should take them a while.
Good ole WTO i say.
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 13:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Let's hope they price the "goods" appropriately.
If they play it cleverly they can get quite a lot out of this, even though they can only run the site (if they choose to) to reclaim the £21M owed.
So. My logic would be this. The site(s) would be prone to DDoS attacks (from certain bodies) and potentially even physical attacks. therefore the infrastructure should be sufficiently complex and secure to protect against this (and equally expensive). There will be lots of DMCA requests and so they will need a lot of personnel to manually trawl through these (along with lots of expensive lawyers). As such they can demonstrate (using Hollywood finiancial methods) that even though they are charging $1 per HD movie, the actual profits (when all the costs of the extra security, etc have been accounted for) is 0.01$ per movie, and hence they will only shut down the site after 4.2 billion downloads - which could take a long time. During that time the US are effectively paying to employ all the personnel required to operate the service (possibly the same people who lost their jobs originally due to the gambling issue).
Sounds like a plan.
What will probably happen (if the hollywood movie industry has any sense) is that they, hollywood et al, club together to pay the $21M and then add this into their current 'hollywood finance' equations to show that they need pay even less tax (if that is possible).
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Wednesday 30th January 2013 17:35 GMT CmdrX3
The DMCA requests should be easy enough
Just filter them to go directly to deleted files. As copyright is suspended by international law, it's would be a perfectly legal site and DMCA, quite apart from being an American law (although they deem otherwise) is not relevant. They may need to be careful though and ensure only US copyrights are ignored as any other countries copyrights remain valid and in force.
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