If true, this has to be one of the more bizarre ways to counteract piracy I have ever seen. I don't know what percentage of piracy is enabled by people carrying hard drives full of pirated movies across borders, but I'm sure it is vanishingly small - that is, after all, what pirates use the _internet_ for.
It is not to stop piracy. It is to detect and punish people who have pirated content in their possession.
You can't invade people's homes but you can search them thoroughly while crossing the border. People are used to having their privacy invaded while crossing the border.
The problem is that I have signed a contract with my company that says I must keep the data on my company laptop private and encrypted. There are trade secrets in there. What should I do ? Only have blank laptops to cross the border and download everything through ssh once on the other side ?
If from overseas, would it help to have a business own the laptop, and its data? You can then legitimately say the business owns the illegal data, or deny knowledge of a hidden partition, or say you have no access to a key?
[Posted using my own account... not a US citizen and not hoping to travel there. If I were extradited i guess i wouldnt take any equipment or data!]
An interesting question is that if someone were to travel (non-commercially) across borders with a fake gucci bag, could that person could be held liable under ACTA for the case that a) they were aware of the product was counterfeit and/or b) the case in which they were unaware?
It's beginning to sound like it's dangerous to buy anything whose essential feature is IP: movies, music, fancy luggage, watches.
I think the safest thing is to not buy these things. Buy the most serviceable and reliable vanilla physical products (a watch, not a Rolex). Don't buy music, and certainly don't have music or movies on your laptop when you cross borders.
Anything protected by commercial IP is becoming too dangerous to have around, legally obtained or not.
Yes. Near the French / Italian border there are targeted controls for counterfeited products. Common sense should tell you you can't get a Gucci bag for 200$, or anywhere outside of a luxury shop ;) And yes, you are also liable if you were unaware - but most people are actually aware.
Common sense should tell you you can't get a Gucci bag for 200$, or anywhere outside of a luxury shop
Where would a person learn this? I've heard the brand name Gucci before, but I had no idea it was so expensive. Naturally, I'm not the sort of person who would buy such things because of the name of the company who made them, but it also wouldn't seem strange to me to see a given brand on sale outside of a luxury store.
I guess we each have our own set of assumptions about what the "average person" should consider common knowledge.
I agree- I had no idea. $200 sounds expensive to me, so if someone offered one for that and I wanted to buy it for my wife I probably would. I've bought "Coach" brand for about that at the mall, so an approximately equivalent price wouldn't set off any alarms in my head.
Who cares. IP protection trumps basic common sense and basic human rights. And even though we all have to abide by inane protectionism schemes, we should not be allowed to directly vote on them, because direct democracy would make uninformed people make impulsive decisions and possibly introduce theocracies everywhere. So to prevent theocracy, we have to prevent direct democracy, which means we cant vote on copyright, which means we have to swallow down our pride and just abide by any IP protectionism scheme the informed overlords make in agreement with the industrial stake holders. There sadly is no middle way. It is either theocracy or IP protectionism. Pick one.
