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US Blocking Costa Rican Sugar Trade To Force IP Laws
For the last couple of days news has been trickling in about how the US is trying to ram IP laws down Costa Rica's throat by blocking their access to the US sugar market. Techdirt has a good summary of the various commentaries and a related scoop in the Bahamas where the US is also applying IP pressure. "The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of 'free trade' — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It's blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws."
Makes me want to setup shop on an island to buy sugar from Costa Rica solely for the purpose of reselling it to the US so Costa Rica can maintain their dignity.
And any other resource for that matter... maybe some type of ship exchange like you do with Propane. Hell, I could corner the market on all sugar imports so they won't be able to tell how much of it is Costa Rica sugar...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Kind of makes you wonder how much of the presentation the lobbyists did included the HFCS and corn production losses to the amount of sugar being imported...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You misunderstand the meaning of free trade/the free market. It's free as in free for the more advanced economies, but not for the rest. Historically, countries like Europe and America (and others) have strengthened their economies by violating free market principles, and enforcing them on others.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
How many of you know, specifically, your elected representatives' views on international trade?
And how many of you plan to claim you did, but really didn't,and had to look it up when I called you on it?
If laws differed between member nations then one nation would be able to use intellectual property to manufacture their goods which was prohibited by other members thus creating an unfair advantage.
That's only unfair if the other nations' laws are themselves fair. And of course, what's fair can vary quite a lot depending on one's circumstances. You're essentially suggesting the equivalent of a flat tax, where everyone is taxed the same amount in currency, regardless of ability to pay or the ratio of one's overall income or wealth to the amount of the tax. It's generally accepted that progressive taxes are more fair, where the amount you pay is proportional to the amount you have and can afford. Why shouldn't we try a similar model here? Given that copyright laws govern importation already, which avoids the problem of arbitrage, what's so bad about this? Further, shouldn't each nation strive to enact laws that best serve its own people? I'd be happy to have Costa Rica decide for itself what sorts of copyright laws would best serve Costa Ricans, so long as the US was similarly free of pernicious influences that result in a law that isn't as good for its people as possible, whether those influences are from without or within.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
its a direct, unavoidable consequence of the rise of the internet
ip laws only make sense when they are a gentleman's agreement among a handful of publishers. they are completely unenforceable when every teenager in his basement is a publisher to anyone else at zero cost, for anything you want
the wise thing for costa rica to do is simply agree to whatever the usa demands ip law wise. and then its business as usual. which is: everything is available with no ip restrictions to anyone remotely familiar with a computer console
enforcement is impossible, even for the usa within its own borders, so who fucking cares what the lawyers and bureaucrats and corporations say? they've already been routed around
i'm not saying you shouldn't get upset at the arrogance and the audacity of the american demands, i'm saying a bully making demands without any actual ability to follow through on his threats is nothing you have to pay any respect to
you simply pay the asshole lip service, put a big smile on your face, say "yes" to whatever the asshole wants, and then its business as usual, which is: ip laws mean nothing. all of the posturing and threats and demands mean nothing. there's NO ENFORCEMENT POSSIBLE
let all the corporate lawyers, midlevel bureaucrats amd other pointless yammering meat popsicles create all the ip laws and agreements they want
WHO FUCKING CARES. they can't enforce any of it. its the internet age. this is not vhs copy machines in a warehouse or cd duplicators in the closet. you can't shut down the internet
people: stop getting upset at these retards trying to enforce laws from a previous technological era and just igore them and their petty demands without any muscle behind them. they can't stop technological change. they are defunct, they just don't know it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The other day, over a Mexican Coca Cola (real sugar), I said to my companion something along the lines of "drink up, this is the ONLY benefit of Free Trade for the common man".
The US has done everything to make real sugar more expensive, shoving all the HFCS at us. Mexican Coca Cola via NAFTA really is the only tangible benefit I can think of from all this Free Trade multinational corporate nonsense. And if you think about it, it's not really a benefit at all since before the corn lobby captured Congress, we used to mix up Coca Cola with real sugar on THIS side of the border.
So. I stand corrected. Still no real benefit to the current Free Trade regime.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Since you brought it up. I actually saw a High Fructose Corn Syrup advertisement of all things, on the Food Network the other day. Maybe I'm behind the times, but pushing HFCS seems pretty much as irresponsible as pushing nicotine at least. And it wasn't that they were advertising, "Hey buy our stuff!" no, the ad showed one mother pouring what appeared to be Kool-Aid for a bunch of kids, then another mother coming up to say "Hey! Stop that, HFCS is bad!" the other lady goes "Why?, .......... the first lady stares like an idiot. And then kool-aid lady goes into a spiel about how it's made from CORN, which is natural, and can't be that bad, and everything is fine in moderation, and they both have a big heaping glass of High fructose corn syrup.
Something seems distinctly...off... about that commercial.
You mean you would be willing to give costa ricans 200 year patentability in the US if their law grants patents for 200 years? I guess that would be quite profitable for Costa Rica, but for some reason you seem to believe the terms are for the US to decide. Which is absolute rubbish.
There is no natural God-given right for developed countries to first import slaves from developing countries, then make them slaves in their own countries making running shoes, and then when they finally start to get on their own feet, tell them they cannot make and give aids and malaria drugs to their own citizens because "we invented them first". It's a very modern idea that you can dictate to another government that they cannot medicate their own citizens with whatever means they have domestically available. And it's also idiotic.
Why is the US using sugar instead of a bigger product for Costa Rica, like coffee or bananas?
I'll tell you why, there's a controlling elite in Costa Rica that has managed the country for a few years already, and the head of this elite is the current President and his brother, Oscar and Rodrigo Arias, which in turn own the biggest sugar cane fields in the country. So the attack is directly to their pockets and so they move all their influence to enforce the IP law, that includes stupid rules as that every restaurant or public place will have to pay royalty to the RIAA equivalent in our country if they play the radio to keep their customers entertained!
The worst case is that the oposition in our country is not well organized nor has the intellectual strength to fight this kind of laws, plus the elite has majority in congress, so the IP laws have some resistance, but they have not been approved because congress is to darn slow to do anything, so we'll get them eventually.