Blissful Japan

This is a crazy new law being proposed which will give border guards and security personnel the right to inspect the contents of your laptop, iPod, cell phone for content that infringes on copyright laws (music and movies): Crazy ACTA Trade Agreement (Wikileaks)

Apparently they already have in some cases the right to look at anything on your laptop in the pretense of checking for child pornography. This looks more like a fishing trip. First look for something that most people will support, child porn or illegal music, then “discover” something else.

The record industry is trying to make ripping CDs illegal, so they want to have DRM only downloads on an iPod. In other words if it is not digitally signed it is not legal.

Is the next step is the right to enter our homes and go through our disk drives, without a court order or probable cause. It’s amazing that this type of thing is even being considered much less this close to becoming a reality!

According to Slashdot it sounds even worse:

“The proposal includes clauses designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of copyrighted information exchange on the Internet, which would also affect transparency sites such as Wikileaks. The Wikileaks document details provisions that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. If adopted, the treaty would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools.”

And here is a more moderate take on ACTA from Ars Technica.