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Politicians Worldwide Asking Questions About ACTA
An anonymous reader writes "Legislators around the world are demanding more information on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. US Senator Ron Wyden demanded answers in a letter to the USTR (PDF) this week, ACTA arose in the UK House of Commons yesterday,
and French Deputy Nicolas Dupont-Aignan raised ACTA questions in the National Assembly late last year. All of this comes on top of earlier efforts from Swedish Member of the European Parliament Jens Holm, as well as New Zealand MP Clare Curran, who has repeatedly raised concerns about ACTA, and NDP MP Charlie Angus, who posed questions about ACTA in the Canadian House of Commons late last year."
ACTA comes from utterly fraudulent governance, and not from the public's mandate.
True enough, but you're leaving something out. ACTA comes from the union of fraudulent governments which are owned and operated by multinational corporations. These multinationals have no allegiance to anyone or anything except money and power. This agreement or treaty or whatever they want to call it is just one symptom of a much larger problem.
From what I've seen, multilateral treaties are difficult to pass. That's not to say that they're impossible to pass, but the fact that you have N number of countries with N number of political calculations to make (even if they're not democracies) makes it difficult to come to a solid agreement. That's why the FTAA seems to have failed. There was just too much disagreement.
Exceptions are whatever copyright treaty got passed, WTO, etc)
(BTW, slightly off topic, I saw a Blu-Ray movie with the FBI copyright warning in French, which I had never seen before on any DVD. That was a little creepy and funny at the same time.)
The U.S. has been much more successful by pushing its agenda through bilateral (U.S.-Canada free trade agreement) or trilateral agreements (NAFTA).
My guess is that instead of the ACTA passing, there will instead be a series of bilateral and trilateral agreements with various countries, such as how the U.S. pushed Singapore to adopt DMCA-like laws in a "free trade agreement".
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" ... fraudulent governments which are owned and operated by multinational corporations ... "
Don't be so eager to wave the white flag. You have more power than you imagine.
I've posted most of this before on slashdot; This is just a cleanup of previous posts -- it has details of why the ACTA is secret.
A Private War
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.
An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn't matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that's exactly what they're doing.
What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don't really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.
Culture Connection
Just as we have physical connections to each other, we now have digital connections to one another. These connections actively resist attempts at control because it impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. People naturally seek the methods which give them the greatest freedom to express themselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness. Copyright law has been twisted to serve as a bulwark against the logical result of increasing social interconnectedness between people and computers: Access an ever-increasing amount of humanity's history, knowledge, and culture. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. It's how, when, and where it fails that will decide the fate of economies worldwide.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. And every engine, be it physical or social, functions because an energy imbalance exists and by moving energy from one potential to another, we can skim some off to do useful work. Laws work the same way -- by creating artificial differences between groups of people, society produces goods and services. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. It's not a comfor
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