| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Canadian New Counterfeit Act Authorizes Border Security Copyright Stasi
The Truth Behind The News
Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
March 4, 2013
In Ottawa, Canada bill C-56 entitled “Combating Counterfeit Products Act” was introduced that will combat counterfeiting endeavors while focusing on copyright to turn border security into “experts” without due process, attribute new criminal penalties for counterfeit commercial trademarks and Stasi for the Canadian and US governments.
BA International, the corporation that prints fiat currency in Ottawa, Canada, has announced that it has ceased printing paper fiat as of December 2012. The replacement currency is moving toward polymer bills. Because of the high-capacity for counterfeiting with paper fiat, the Bank of Canada is seeking to circulate polymer-based fiat with the $100 bill as the first of its kind.
Canada is marketing polymer fiat to its citizens as a durable and secure mode of tender trading. It also has a longer lasting lifetime as opposed to paper fiat, as well as safer for the environment. According to the Bank of Canada: “The detailed metallic imagery carried in a transparent area of the notes makes for one-of-a-kind currency.”
According to the 2013 Trade Policy Agenda and 2012 Trade Policy Report the Canadian government is encouraged to “meet its Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) obligations by providing its customs officials with ex officio authority to stop the transit of counterfeit and pirated products through its territory.”
ACTA was first announced in late 2007, the U.S., the EU, Switzerland, and Japan said they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement agreement to counter the illegal counterfeit goods trade across borders. ACTA is a “trade agreement”, which allows countries to work in alignment on certain matters. It is similar to SOPA/PIPA in that it will battle copyright infringement, but expand to patents, counterfeit goods and intellectual property rights.
The U.S. signed it in October, along with other major economies like Australia, Canada, South Korea and Japan. European member states still have to wait for the European Parliament to agree.
ACTA, global big brother to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, is designed to protect intellectual property, say its American and European supporters. It would allow companies from any participating country (which include EU member states, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Morocco) to shut down websites without any explanation.
The agreement will create an “ACTA Committee” to make amendments to the agreement. The problem is that this committee is not accountable to anybody. A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable, however, said that the ACTA negotiations had been “set at a higher level than is customary for non-security agreements”, leading to some criticizing the build-up phase as ’state secrecy’.
“If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it,” the Electronic Freedom Foundation – a watchdog group that monitors Internet privacy and freedom issues – said in a recent blog post.
“Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens,” said the post. “Worse still, the agreement creates a new global institution, an ‘ACTA Committee’ to oversee its implementation and interpretation that will be made up of unelected members with no legal obligation to be transparent in their proceedings. Both in substance and in process, ACTA embody an outdated top-down, arbitrary approach to government that is out of step with modern notions of participatory democracy.”
The following excerpt from Brzezinski’s book “Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era”, provides invaluable insight into the world being brought in; “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by the elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
The authors of SOPA and PIPA are the same people who wrote the file sharing software they claimed are infringing on copyright laws.
The EU has suspended the ratification of a controversial anti-computer piracy agreement, questioning its legality. It will now be investigated to see if the document is compatible with human rights and freedoms.
Known as ACTA, the bill has been heavily criticized by web freedom activists, sparking multiple protests across Europe. If passed, the legislation will allow customs officers at airports to examine all devices that may contain pirated data. The authorities will also gain unlimited access to private digital information.
Another Big Brother watchdog is the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA). It has submitted its annual watch list to the Office of the US Trade Representative. In it they single out Canada, China, Russia and India — as well as over 30 other countries — for allegedly failing to do all they can to protect the intellectual property rights of the MPAA and Hollywood entertainers. The IIPA recommends 41 distinct countries and territories for placement on a series of global watch lists that should be monitored due to concerns of copyright infringement.
The IIPA sites several popular file-sharing sites and torrent directories hosted internationally. The result of the inquiry could prompt federal authorities to continue cracking down on non-US sites that violate American law. Megaupload was a casualty of this organization.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have taken control of domain names under “Operation Fake Sweep”. Anyone logging onto these sites receive a seizure message, have their IP address tracked and could face criminal charges themselves.
The crackdown is part of “Operation In Our Sites”, an enforcement to bring down 669 sites on the internet. The MPAA, the entertainment industry of Hollywood and the U.S. government have teamed up to criminalize file sharing websites in a bigger effort to censor the internet.
All of these measures are to ensure governments of the world can control their citizen’s internet movements. Since the internet is an information sharing tool, it is likely that the agenda behind these controls are to create a global stronghold over our ability to inform each other. And if information is controlled, then all that is left is propaganda approved by the government.
2013-04-21 17:00:20
Source:
