ACTA, why i am overreacting and the IP singularity

this is my overreaction to the ACTA white paper produced by the US government.
Link: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2008/05/22/leaked-us-govt-discussion-paper-on-proposed-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta-from-wikileaks/
God help us all.

IF YOU SUPPORT ACTA, YOU SUPPORT CORPORATE COMMUNISM.

this document could signify the death of everything the internet is, was and could become. it could also mean the premature end of my future career. why? read the damn thing. the first page is frightening enough. wait until you've read the rest.
if this comes into effect, any business that holds intellectual property can, under the guise of protecting their IP, shut down competitors simply by lodging insubstantiated complaints against their key staff and departments. they can also find that company's customers and threaten them with "IP scans" unless the customers pay them indemnity fees. think that affects whoever is supposed to be targeted? think again: they will be clever enough to either exploit or circumvent the situation, just like before. this IP protection program just means more work and more return for them if they DO break the system and sell the way they did it to others. what it will lead to is consumers paying because they cannot to defend themselves in court against whatever may have been found on their hard drives or browser histories (remember we are talking IP here, not specific products, and a line of text can be seen as IP. combine that with prosecution that can occur without the right-holder initiating it, and it's a fucking free-for-all) and companies having new ways of competing against each other outside of actually servicing customers (remember that w are talking about the entertainment industry here, the corporate equivalent of communism; they will do anything bar actually rewarding the people who produce their IP in the first place, the people who consume the IP and rewarding original thought. instead, they decide to ruin the lives of producers and consumers alike; corporate communism. give it a round of applause).
the next problem is that with this legislation, companies wanting to snoop on any improvements to a competitors' EDI or ERP systems no longer have to engage in active corporate espionage; they just have to "inquire with" (read; bribery using higher allowable prices and contract durations. untraceable, unprosecutable for both parties if done right) their ISP for covert scanning of the competitors' online data packages (for traces of data indicating certain programs and processes are being used, with the implication of violated IP), which can then give a general idea of a competitors' systems, what programs they are running and how they are running them. god help them if they use external providers for their servers and data centres; if a consultant provides electronic network hardware and services and they get classed as an ISP, they would be required by law to divulge their clients' entire network infrastructure, which competitors can acquire if they push a bogus complaint far enough for their lawyers to get their hands on it and to leave it lying on the clients' desk "by accident" long enough for a higher-up to make a few photocopies.
you think i'm being dramatic?
well, i am. why? well, i am about to graduate in an area where sophisticated electronic networks and their applications, trust and cooperation/collaboration methodologies and policies are still being developed. the whole area relies on two things; competitive advantage and the trust on a business's corporate suppliers and organisational customers.
the competitive advantage stems from being able to create efficiencies and optimise the business system in a way your competitors cannot copy effecively and being able to trust partners and contractors to help you achieve this. with this law, these areas are blown wide open; you can't trust external contractors and suppliers, because they would be legally obliged to hand over any information regarding your processes and activities to the anti-IP infringement police or anybody that is licensed to snoop it or just curious to find out how you do stuff. all those lovely competitively advantageous processes you built will be safe up until a competitor gets one of his lawyers to get a legal copy of you systems to ensure that no IP infringement has taken place which will, of course, have to be evaluated by the competitors' management and IT/operations staff to ensure none of their processes have been pirated. so why build new competitive systems when you can just as easily replicate it via lawyer and photocopying machine?
and lo and behold, the areas of logistics and supply chain management get a brand new asshole ripped open, simply because this law will give any IP holder access to any other IP holders' secrets under the guise of making sure that noone was being ripped off. if you think i'm kidding, think about what the RIAA does now. now, take off any restrictions and you get what it will become.

just wait until the first corporate versions of the pirate bay turn up, listing complete specifications of wal-mart's transportation/VMI operating system, the EDI/ERP systems used by NASA or BAE systems, Microsoft's entire operations and release schedules for the next x amount of months. if every individual, company and/or organisation can be scanned for IP violations, then all the confidential information is not confidential anymore. For the ISP's, collecting customer information is a huge cost, since they need to keep the information readily accessible for long periods of time to governments.keeping the information available without being able to sell it on (if you were a criminal, how much would you value being able to use somebody else's bank accounts to launder drug money without being detected? the valuation you just put on that is the cost that an ISP will face for every single piece of information. it's not the cost of storage, it's the opportunity cost of what you'd be able to make in revenue with all that information to sell). all you need is one corrupt ISP official and a bunch of mafiosi operating out of Budapest will be able to use the credit cards and business accounts details for all the inhabitants of the entire eastern seaboard of the US. hello, the world's first financial botnet farm.

couple of things we can do:

-build data havens, where all your data is untraceable.
-establish black ISPs and phantom servers that give anonymous access to the internet.
-bypass the internet entirely.
-crash ISP data farms.

alternatively, let's try and stop this damn law.

one good thing about this is this; China won't sign this. Why? because China's main advantageous manufacturing position comes from being able to copy, reverse-engineer and plagiarise every piece of IP they come across. this is not a cold move of communists against the western democracies; no, China uses its position to improve its infrastructure and consolidate its economic growth by incorporating proprietary IP into the economy. it this agreement comes into effect, China's plans for consolidating itself dissolve into a series of international lawsuits by companies and countries with processes copied by china.

this entry focuses on the effect of ACTA on the internet, but what happens when you create new IP using old IP? with these new restrictions, what happens if you have to pay royalties to 10 other companies and individuals for a new innovation? what if you had to pay the US government money for every time you accessed the internet because they hold the IP rights to the original computer network, the DARPANET? with these new restrictions, this becomes possible. if this does happen, the cost of innovation and new ideas is not lowered, but increases with every new layer of ideas that are piled on top of it. which means that any new IP is either too expensive to develop and manufacture or does not have enough consumers capable of buying it due to the high licensing prices incurred by the IP. this will lead to the IP singularity, where the cost of committing plagiarism is greater than the cost of acknowledging the original source work. see you on the other side.

PS.: With this, Windows can go back to its old tricks of suing Linux developers for IP violations. but, instead of doing it for its own products, it can do it for IP violations of other products from other companies, creating a de facto class-action lawsuit for itself where finding IP violations for one product could mean everybody else gets compensation as well. from linux users or people posessing live CDs. Think about it.