Slashdot Mirror
Citizens Demand To See Secret ACTA Treaty
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "One hundred groups of concerned citizens have united to demand a look at the secret ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty and have drafted a letter to their representatives asking for information. We've discussed ACTA before, including what are believed to be parts of ACTA that lawmakers are trying to get a head start on."
Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, etc...
When I was in school (a while ago) these were books we had to read.
Seems most people 10, 15, or more years younger than myself haven't even heard of these stories.
Corporations are taking over the world. A well functioning democracy requires an educated populace.
Considering what public schools are turning out here in the US, so much of what happens in the world isn't surprising to me anymore.
I don't know what is more disturbing, the fact that so many people don't seem bothered by things like TFA, or that people aren't aware of them and/or don't understand them.
I like to know what my government is doing behind my back Screwing you.
yes, but it's much easier to arrange a "civil protest" about an action when you know what's going on BEFORE they vote on it.
not to push buttons here, but if there had been enough time prior to the patriot act being voted on, do you think people would have gotten into an uproar?
for this whole democracy thing to work right, we need to have an edumacated populace, we need to know what's going on in enough time to tell our congress-critters how we feel they should represent us.
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
The fact that this is even an issue suggests that things are thoroughly rotten. There are arguably justified instances of government secrecy(aspects of national defence, any private data that has to be handled during course of business, certain subsets of police activity); but there is absolutely no plausible claim that ACTA falls under such a heading.
Unfortunately, even figuring out who is responsible is a rather murky business. This is the one thing that really bothers me about a lot of international/multinational activities and organizations. Democracy is tenuous enough with the layers of alleged representation within a nation, once you lay a mass of appointed diplomats on top of that, you get something largely opaque and unresponsive. That might be ok if your job is agreeing that starving orphans are tragic; but if you work will end up as law across the developed world, you need to do better than that.(well, actually you don't, and we just have to suck it up; but I meant that in the normative sense)
Ditto. Stop worrying about where taxation money goes and start realizing, "wait a second, they stole my money!"
This government has forgot a basic precept, that we are citizens, not subjects.
That their power exists only so long as we grant it to them.
Yes, they stole your money and used it to build roads, build hospitals, maintain and strengthen a military, provide protection from criminals, educate the young, stop threats against the country, and help out those who have run into misfortune. Yes, they stole your money and you will never get it back in any form.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Any representative of your government, my government, or any other western-style democratic government can sign any treaty they like.
But, until that treaty is passed through the necessary legislative body/bodies and ratified then it hasn't become law.
Put another way both the executive branch and the legislative branch have to approve of any treaty for it to be entered into the statute books.
Even if that weren't the case, if the wording of the treaty conflicts with the wording of a constitution, charter, bill of rights, or any other already existing law. It becomes the responsibility of the judicial branch to decide which has a higher standing in-law, in almost all cases you will find that the constitution, charter, or bill of rights will be found to have precedence.
What bothers me the most, and what I don't think most people understand / are aware of, is how international treaties can be signed, thus becoming laws which supersede the most supreme law of the country (constitution, charter, bill of rights etc.) all without public knowledge or involvement.
I think every single democratic country desperately needs to update their charters with clauses requiring that all international agreements be signed with public knowledge, consent and involvement and to clearly make available avenues for referendums so that the public can force their governments to withdraw if the majority of the population wishes (without replacing their government obviously).
It's amazing that everyone seems to equate corporations=capitalism.
If you actually sit down and analyse the way most corporations behave in an economic sense, you'll find that there is very little about their behaviour that fits with laissez-faire style of capitalism of which you obviously believe they are manifest.
SME are a close fit to the capitalist model. Multinational corporations have a much closer kinship with centrally planned marxist models.
When you say "Corporations are taking over the world", are you generalizing a bit, or do you really hate Capitalism, or do you have a better explanation for Corporations as the cause of the crap storm that is our future?
Please don't read this as a troll I'm just trying to understand your perspective on the matter.
Essentially you and I can agree on a number of things although I would add Atlas Shrugged to that list, and I would say "People who do not think are taking over the world."
I'm curious as to how far apart our view points are while still arriving at a similar estimation of the problem. That will be the true test of how bad it is.
technically, their power exists at this point (if you're american) until we take it away from them. Remember 2000? Nobody won, nobody was granted the power by the people. Unless by people, you mean the government appointed courts.
Uh... I'm thinking if all they wanted was to kill a few thousand people anywhere, it would have cost a lot less than the Billions of dollars spent on the Iraq project
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Also, how can this still be called a "democracy" when those people, who are supposedly holding the power, are not allowed to know what their so-called representatives are doing?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The Free Software Foundation has published "Speak out against ACTA", stating that the ACTA threatens free software by creating a culture "in which the freedom that is required to produce free software is seen as dangerous and threatening rather than creative, innovative, and exciting."[7] Specifically the FSF argues that ACTA will makes it more difficult and expensive to distribute free software via file sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent, which are currently used to distributing large amounts of free software. The FSF also argues that ACTA will make it harder for users of free operating systems to play media because DRMed media cannot be played with free software