The Obama administration is apparently negotiating a secret copyright treaty whose absurd contents have been leaked.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
That's just the start of the badness. The whole thing is completely impossible to enforce, so I'm not particularly worried about it. intellectual property is dead and a piece of paper won't bring it back to life.
(HT: RD.)
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