After the protests and public outcry over SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA you would expect the MPAA to understand, it wasn’t just a few companies that were complaining, it was the biggest stake holder, the public. Now they are trying to exclude the people most affected by laws concerning open and free communications and make deals with a few corporations.
http://blog.mpaa.org/BlogOS/post/2012/02/16/Moving-Forward-on-Piracy-.aspx
For many people in the content industry its a way of life. The wheeling and dealing, the insider club, the exclusivity, once you get there you have a small group surrounding you. A group that you tend to stick with. That shares the same values, have their own dialect, and has the same faith in the way things have always been done.
Groups like this tend to strike out at anything that threatens their way of life. Religious, Political, and Social groups all do this. They rationalize their actions and believe anything, no matter how logically incorrect, to support their point of view. In order to maintain the coherence of the group they always find another group or a concept to demonize. For the longest time it was any sort of change, now their demon is the internet and they are using Google as its face.
If large enough these groups become stuck in a perpetual denial, anger, bargaining loop. The loop is driven by a meme gaining strength and giving hope, running its course through the group. Each time through the loop they push further, each time thinking this will fix the problem. The content industry has been doing this for 30 years now. The end result is the copyright in its modern form.
Google is combining many of its 70 privacy policies into one that spans most of their internet properties. This is information they already have, now it is spread out over multiple websites. This will allow Google to track your online habits across most of its websites. Many individuals, privacy groups, the US government, and the EU are worried about this. This personally worries me on many levels. It allow the government a single place to find most, or if you are a heavy Google user like myself, all of your online habits. The more I look at this issue, the more I understand the privacy rights issues the Europeans are expressing.
The solutions given by Google are don’t use Google, sign out to not be tracked, and create a new account for each service. The last one is the interesting one, and offers a possible solution for most online tracking.
Browser plugins are applications that adds additional functionality to a web browser. What is needed is a plugin that does several things, securely stores users names and passwords for individual sites, logs you out of a site as you are leaving it, and protects your privacy. All of this functionality has already been created, and is available as individual opensource plugins on sourceforge.net. This needs to be combined into a single application, that clears both standard and flash based cookies, cleans up URL’s as you are browsing, logs you into and out of sites automatically, can be configured to prevents JavaScript from loading or running, and allows you to browse anonymously while logged out.
I will work on this in my spare time. When I am done coding this I will tweet it, post here, and contact techdirt, the EFF, and TorrentFreak.
In order to make an truly informed decision about (wikpedia links >>->) ACTA, TPP*, SOPA, and PIPA you need to read them. Everyone is talking about how these are internet-killing, speech-stifling, and how they will be abused. All this is true. In all actuality how many have actually read these bills, and trade agreements?
Here they are the actual texts for your perusal.
ACTA – Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (text)
TPP – Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (text)
SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act (text)
PIPA – PROTECT IP Act (text)