In some very good news, Antigua has won its case against the United States in a ruling by the WTO (World Trade Organization). We had previously written about the case here.
Pay attention to the small print on this one, “The WTO did allow Antigua to target US copyrights in order to make up that amount”. That might mean that Antigua will become the next best safe haven for Bittorrent Trackers on the planet. If Antigua gets this one, they need to build a datacenter, take on some more bandwidth, and literally, open the gates to every Bittorrent, P2P, and other tracking systems on the planet.
Before you say “this is illegal or immoral” read the fine print again.
“The WTO did allow Antigua to target US copyrights in order to make up that amount”. In context from Techdirt they state:
Today the WTO came down with its final (no, this time they swear, it’s final, dammit!) ruling, saying (again) that the US definitely did violate trade agreements, but that Antigua is only entitled to $21 million. The WTO did allow Antigua to target US copyrights in order to make up that amount, but the way folks like the RIAA “count” the value of copyright, $21 million is, what, like 10 songs. Source: Techdirt
While the bloggers world deals with what is and what is not content theft, the WTO has gutted international copyright laws by specifically authorizing a country to go around said international copyright laws.
It will be very interesting to see what Antigua is going to do with this kind of new found power, and what influence this will have on other countries in a similar situation.
