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A Look At ACTA Wish Lists For RIAA, BSA, Others
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property brings us an analysis of several organizations' goals for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which we've discussed previously. In particular, he points out the anti-privacy views of the Business Software Alliance: "While the ACTA itself is not public, the US Trade Representative has at least released the ACTA comments. While many of them are to be expected, such as the RIAA & co. wanting copyright filters, one item on the BSA's wish list really stands out: 'In a number of European countries one of the biggest impediments to efforts by rights holder to enforce their IP rights on the Internet is the overbroad interpretation of privacy laws by some European authorities.' They want ACTA to 'fix' that by neutering the privacy laws. Given the BSA's other questionable activities, it couldn't hurt to tell their member companies what you think of their participation. After all, organizations like the BSA exist in part to shield their members from bad PR."
Full documents of comments from the various organizations are available at Public Knowledge.
I just cannot understand what possible rationalization there could be for ACTA not being worked on in the open(yeah, yeah, obviously I know why working behind closed doors would be what they want; but I'm talking about justification here).
Even by the bizarro world standards of something state doesn't like = terrorist threat and camera in same room as child = pedophile menace, I can't think of a good justification for doing a copyright "harmonization" treaty in private. WTF.
"beloved Apple"? Apple has more taste than most of the rest of team evil; but they play at least as mean as anybody else on that list, and meaner than some. I don't expect that to get any better, now that the majority of their money comes from a) selling the only computers on which they allow their OS to run, b) selling phones heavily locked in various ways and cashing in on those who profit from the locks, and c) content sale and rental on DRMed platforms.
The one on that list that surprises me is Intel. They make very little software, other than drivers and compilers, and their hardware isn't exactly easy to clone. There are already special restrictions in place for reverse engineering ICs, and the world isn't exactly bursting that the seams with sleazy back-alley 300mm wafer 45nm process fabs.
Most of the rest of the list is the usual BS(A)ing suspects, or at least, like cisco, in the business of making hardware that is pretty clonable. Anybody have any ideas about Intel?