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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."
What's "IP La"? In Central America, wouldn't it be "La IP" instead?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
We still have corn syrup!
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
Cuz increasingly that's all we have left. Especially now that money-printing business has hit the fan.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
I can't think of many countries that don't use tariffs or trade restrictions to promote their own national interests in some way. It may be stupid and benefit no one in the end, but it's still within a nation's rights to take their ball and go home.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I was going to say "is that even legal?" but since it's part of their trade agreement I suppose it was to be expected, but that's still pretty low of the US to block access to the sugar market. Pro tip: sell your sugar to to Europe!
US produces IP and wants to protect it.
Sugar being a tangible item is what Costa Rica produces.
You want to trade with the US you should play by US rules. The US want to trade with Costa Rica we play by Costa Rican rules, thus the trade agreement.
I see nothing wrong here.
Why these trade rules aren't being used to enforce environmental agreements and not IP ones is somewhat beyond me.
That government of the corporations
By the corporations
For the corporations
Shall not perish from the Earth
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
US pushes around Central American country and gets away with it because we are their biggest market. Gee, that's only been the story of, what, the past 150 years?
... doesn't mean they were wrong.
Congratulations, the West was so focused on preventing communist totalitarians from taking over the world we've let capitalists move in and fill the niche.
The One World Government is here. But it's not a communist state, it's a kleptocracy.
(Hey, but at least we have Avatar and deep fried butter to distract us.)
I can see the fnords!
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
Intellectual property laws being uniform across a free trade so is REQUIRED for free trade of intellectual property and clearly not 'the exact opposite of free trade.' 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. This would be most dramatic if the intellectual property was produced in one nation under its laws then used without license by another nation to effectively eliminate the benefits of the intellectual property protects. These protections are for the creators not for the nations (thus not protectionist in the traditional sense). Free trade is to stop nations from creating safe havens for their producers by erecting unfair barriers to trade not to allow anyone to take whatever IP they want and use it as they see fit.
And the sad thing is that if Costa Rica tells us to go fsck ourselves, while it will hurt Costa Rica's economy, all it will do here is help sell even more High Fructose Corn Syrup and help the corn lobby here.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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?
This is just wrong... US its just a Bully... President Chavez is right. Cant wait to see all the stupid replies to my comment.
When they STILL our shit, what do they make? ;)
I know stills are used to produce alcohol and perfume, but our shit sure is not perfume.
Maybe they use it to make our beer? Foreigners claim it tastes like ----.
Ahhh, If we can't laugh at ourselves, what can we laugh at.
Isn't part of it because we don't enforce the same rules on China? Where is the blocking of all the Chinese goods because they don't respect IP laws? If we held all countries to the same standard it probably wouldn't be news.
The Government of the United States of America is a whore to corporate interests.
Article I, Section 9. No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state. No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.
That's it. In contrast CAFTA is 3700 pages long. NAFTA is 2000 pages long. These agreements do not give freedom, they take it away.
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
So does this mean the limited time availability for me to buy Mountain Dew Throwback just got even more limited?
They make Budweiser.
for NO GAIN OF OUR OWN (this includes both Iraq (the supposed "bad war") and Afghanistan (the supposed "good war" that people are now having second thoughts about). Your cluelessness on what constitutes a "good country" and a "bad country" is truly epic.
Germany and Japan were only built up as counterweights to the influence of Russia and China. South Korea was a counterweight to China. Vietnam, since the intelligence community at the time was so hilariously inept, was also a counterweight to the threat of communist China. (The Vietnamese have been fighting the Chinese for centuries). Iraq and Afghanistan are strategically important, due to their geography and their natural resources. If Iraq didn't have oil, we wouldn't care what Saddam was doing. And if Saddam had continued to play by the rules, we would have let him continue to murder and kill for decades more. This is why we sit and watch Rwanda and Darfur with detached interest.
This is beyond the fact that the "nation" of Iraq as it is today is a figment of British imagination, purposefully drawn to create a state that is both rich in natural resources and completely divided internally, so it will be dependent on foreign powers. Just as it is beyond the fact that Saudi Arabia has a human rights record just as bad as Iran, it's an Islamic monarchy that doesn't allow non-Muslims to testify in court, or anyone to even pretend to vote, but it receives no criticism because it is - for now - a faithful lapdog.
I doubt you know that we invaded and occupied Haiti, Nicaragua, the Philippines, with tens of thousands of Marines. Or that we sponsored murderous thugs throughout Central and South America, if those thugs provided profit opportunities for American businesses. This is how it begins - a trade war. If it continues, watch the men in charge unleash the media on the "leftist" government in Costa Rica.
Your statement also ignored the fact that these people have a right to choose their own destiny, since they are sovereign nations. Unless you'd like someone to invade America and choose our political system for us, I think you should reconsider your position and it's consequences.
Your understanding of history is truly pathetic. If it wasn't, however, it would be tough to convince me you were an American. I hope for your sake you never receive what you have wished upon others.
For the thousandth time, it's clearly "Your Rights" Online, not Your "Rights Online".
Or, if you prefer, think of it with a comma - Your Rights, Online.
Every non-Internet story has comments like yours; you'd think after a few hundreds stories like this you'd figure it out ;)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If they don't like the deal, then they shouldn't take it (and I wouldn't blame them either). They could take their really cheap sugar and make it a value added more lucrative product by turning it into ethanol fuel, like Brazil does, for instance. Or repurpose the extra sugar cane fields into another valuable food crop, rice maybe? Probably any number of good crops can be grown in that sort of soil.
I don't think Costa Rica has much of anything for a domestic oil supply, it's all imported, so making their own fuel makes more economic sense for them long range, plus adds to national energy independence, which in today's world is a big security issue. Every time you add an additional value added layer to a raw resource..well, that's why they call it "value added". The good stuff distilled from sugar cane squeezings you drink or sell, it is rum, all the other, in the tank.
Then maybe they wouldn't need the US market all that much and could just ignore it.
And it works both ways, as a farmer I am tuned to the security issues of both food and fuel, I think it is *perfectly* acceptable and understandable why any nation would want to maintain a core minimum amount of both food and fuel produced domestically, even if temporarily it might be cheaper on some global market. Heck, look at Japan, they go way out of their way to make sure they have *some* intact farming..they want to at all times be able to feed themselves and not be held hostage for such a critical necessity. Ya it costs them a *lot* more, but it is food insurance. And you really can't put a price on that insurance until some theoretical time when if you didn't have it, all of a sudden your imports stop and..well, that would suck. You'd figure out it was worth it..after the fact. Too late then.
And frankly, if you look at some of the nations that run huge monoculture farms to supply the US or Europe (or now it will be China using African farmland and some of the richer oil exporting mideast nations doing the same), they do so at the expense of the bulk of their own people, instead of growing a variety of food *first*, to feed their own people first as a national priority, they fixate on this external trade large crop, usually run by some local fatcats/cartels, that go to those foreign markets. Makes these fatcats rich, while their own people go hungrier than they should.
Malawi in Africa figured this out, crops for export *as the priority* was bankrupting them and leaving their people to starve all the time. A few people were getting rich there, everyone else.... They switched to "feed the nation first" as their ag policy, including government subsidies and so on, and now they are doing much better. Both their domestic food supply got better, and now they can export more again, just by shifting priorities and working smarter with what they have.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200907020548.html
Yeah, Microsoft isn't that bad...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.
There, fixed that for you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Why this is even a headline these days is absolutely beyond me.
Exactly the same thing was done to Australia a couple of years ago, we are now bound by American Copyright laws in return for some not-100%-royally-screwing-australia "free trade" agreements.
The irony of the thing is that America was founded on "no taxation without representation" and now they want to shove their laws down my throat but without *also* giving me the rights/priviledges of "being an american".
Welcome to the modern methods of empire-building.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I'm not certain whether I should be called a language loonie, a logic loonie or a political radical but here goes my rant: Free trade means free of all laws, all rules, all taxes, all regulations. The blithering about free markets and capitalism is a right wing conspiracy in and of itself. No nation, not even a tribe of primitives, has ever tried free trade for even one solitary moment. The notion of free trade compares to pregnancy. One absolutely is or is not pregnant. There are no stages or shades of grey.
By letting people absorb the false facts about free trade it becomes easy to further manipulate their lives. Obviously it follows as the night the day that if free trade has never existed then nothing really is known about free trade at all. It is false theoretical dribble designed to enslave under educated populations.
I cringe in horror at the supposedly logical, supposedly educated types who spout off about free trade.
While Michael Geist states that they are and that the US is deliberately blocking exports
a technollama article that Geist cited does not seem to have the same opinion. They were not able to confirm a connection between the issues and in fact found information to the contrary.
For reference, the ticotimes.net article simply stated
but as the technollama article indicates, no one else has said this and it could not be confirmed.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables