Harm From The Hague

wfrp01 writes: "Richard Stallman has posted a new essay entitled Harm from the Hague, which presents his take on international enforcement of extra-national court decisions. 'The Hague treaty is not actually about patents, or about copyrights, or about censorship, but it affects all of them. It is a treaty about jurisdiction, and how one country should treat the court decisions of another country. ... Or suppose you publish a parody. If it is read in Korea, you could be sued there, since Korea does not recognize a right to parody.'"

Comments

This only proves...

[somethingwicked]

This only proves...

YOU GOTTA FIGHT...FOR YOUR RIGHT...TO PARODY!!!!

Enter cranked guitar effects as necessay...

Patents:

[mwalker]

Scenario:

German company A patents process "bob" in Germany. American company B patents process "bob" in America. B sues A for patent infringement in America, and wins, enforcing it in Germany against B. B sues A in Germany for patent infrigment and wins, enforcing it in America against A.

The end result: no one can use process "bob", and they both go out of business.

This sounds like a great idea to me, bring it on.

I particularly like Stallman's idea of "shopping for laws", where corporations find countries who will sell anything (cough christmas island, tonga, .cx, .tv) pass laws such as justifiable homicide in response to corporate espionage, or maybe patenting the entire idea of the telephone, or making it illegal to register a domain name.

When the first American gets cained in Pancake Ohio in the town square because they were sued in Singapore for spitting gum on the sidewalk, the fit is gonna hit the shan.

I can't wait.

Jesse Helms

[update()]

You know, what's funny is that for years the one voice against this sort of concession of American sovereignty was Jesse Helms. Of course, all right-thinking people denounced him for his Neanderthal beliefs since everything international had to be good. After all, we're the worst country in the world so any power we cede to foreign countries has to be a net gain, right?

Now that it's become fashionably leftish to oppose "globalization" as mindlessly as it was once pursued, it would be nice if protesters would acknowledge Jesse for keeping the lonely faith through the '80s and '90s.

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

If democratic and elected, not so sad after all.

[maynard]

The world of the future will have international laws that override local ones, international courts to interpret the law, international economic unions to do "what is best for the world" (instead of for a person's native country), international military forces (the UN's working on this), an international police force (i.e., the United States), and a council of probably-unelected international leaders who are concerned about "the greater good."

What gets lost? Individual rights and community rights. Americans will no longer be able to act as Americans, because of how it might affect a Korean, a Swede, a South African or a New Zealander.

I disagree completely. I'm not frightened by the prospect of a world unified government -- in fact I think we desperately NEED one. Global corporations are using jurisdictional differences between nations to avoid child labor and anti-slavery laws. They're misusing tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Through the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, MAI the goal is to reduce the power of elected government to a minimum while increasing the power of corporate control over public life. I think we need a world government in place to check the power of multinationals, and to set level playing field in the marketplace. Unfortunately, one can't have a consistent set of rules in a marketplace a government to oversee and regulate the market. It's clear to me that completely deregulated world markets will lead to global monopolies unlike anything we've seen yet, and this will lead to a catastrophe for the citizens of the world -- never mind democracy as an institution.

So, to me the issue is not should we implement a world government, but HOW? As far as I'm concerned it must be democratically elected, is must fairly represent all of the nations' interests throughout the world, and it should restrict itself to matters of commerce. Currently the WTO is an unelected body which holds the contents of it's meetings in secret. If the world business community continues to control international regulation through secret organizations like the WTO it doesn't matter one bit that you may have elected your officials to power; their ability to write laws in accordance with your (and citzen's wishes) will be circumvented by these unelected bodies for the purpose of "free trade" making local and national government moot.

That's the potential future I fear.

--Maynard

Re:conspiracy? hardly.

[angst_ridden_hipster]

It doesn't matter *why* the law gets written.

What matters is what gets codified into law by the treaty, and what the unexpected side-effects of that law may be.

Laws get applied according to the need of the lawyers. There are a lot of dramatic cases of this. For example, Operation Rescue (radical anti-abortion group) was prosecuted under RICO statutes -- a law created to control organized crime. Similarly, Blue Cross Health Insurance is being sued under RICO because they control how physicians deal out healthcare to their clients. Appropriate? Maybe (depends on your politics), but certainly not what was intended by the original authors in the '70s.

So yes, you should be worried.
bukra fil mish mish
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