I’m sorry to interrupt the tech-centered posts and inflicts politics on you all, but some things are important enough that you can’t ignore them. Among those is the new “cybercrime treaty” – we’re out to get those dangerous foreign terrorists who set out to damage the economy from safe havens outside of the US.
In a nutshell, the treaty calls for cross-country cooperation between nations on cybercrime.
Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, except that the treaty can be invoked on crimes that are only a crime in one of the participating nations, while it’s not a crime in the nation “harbouring” the “criminal”.
Which can lead to such interesting ideas as Russia demanding the FBI to help investigate people who publicly oppose Putin. Or – to make it relevant for the game-developers in my readership – if you create a game that has Nazi symbols in it, Germany or France could ask the FBI for help in prosecuting and apprehending you. Never mind that it falls under freedom of speech here.
And the Bush administration refuses to restrict it to crimes that are crimes in both involved legislations. Now, one could of course go for the simple reasoning that Bush just wants to undermine our liberties. Let’s assume for a moment though that there’s a rationale behind this besides “becoming evil overlord” – I think we need to give Bush a bit more credit than that.
So why could the US be interested in a unilateral enforcement? What’s our major legal beef with European countries these days? Hm. All those European “attacks” on the MPAA/RIAA come to mind – like DVD Jon, the guy who dared to make it possible to have DVD players on Linux. Or Dmitry Sklyarov, who dared to provide software that could read Adobe e-Books.
And, indeed, the text of the treaty also calls explicitly for measures against copyright infringement. I’m sure it’s not the only motivation – but I’m also sure that it’s a large part of it.
Now might be a good time to contact your senators and let them know what you think about curtailing the first amendment.