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Leak Shows US Lead Opponent of ACTA Transparency
An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the debate over ACTA transparency, the secret copyright
treaty, many countries have taken public positions that they support
release of the actual text, but that other countries do not.
Since full transparency requires consensus of all the ACTA partners,
the text simply can't be released until everyone is in agreement.
A new leak
from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency
are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the
way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem
countries."
I am shocked. Just shocked.
right now the score there is 59-41 giving the Republicans only the power to filibuster and not pass anything without the help of at least nine Democrats.
President Clinton, a Democrat, signed the Bono Act and the DMCA in October 1998. He didn't send it back to both houses for a roll-call vote (which requires 67% assent); instead, he let the voice votes in both houses (which require 81% assent) stand.
"American Idol is on tonight, oh goodie" - Typical American
Who's representing the US in the ACTA negotiations. If it's just the usual **AA people, then good luck getting this past The Senate.
Uh, the **AA people own the Senate. They have also infiltrated the Department of Justice. And now that the Supreme Court has ruled it is unconstitutional to limit corporate campaign funding (via advertisements) expect corporate ownership of all branches of government to increase.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
As a resident of one of the mentioned problem countries, I think it might be helpful to point towards an organization to rally behind to oppose the secrecy:
ACTA workgroup of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V.
The D's are not reliable opponents of **AA craziness.
It's not a law yet. They are trying to keep things quiet so that there is not enough time to mount large scale opposistion to the proposal. This will allow them to pass it before most people are aware of the implications. Once its a law it will be a lot harder to repeal or change what they decided in these secret meetings.
I know, I must be new here... Here's an important block of text. Read this:
The U.S. Representatives may be against transparency, but they aren't stupid enough to say so.
Now, their South Korean and Singaporean cronies on the other hand, are stupid enough, and they are opposed to transparency -- because they lose so much money to counterfeiting!</sarcasm>
Get slaughtered by the US military for inciting rebellion?
In the U.S. Congress, a voice vote allows a legislator to neither confirm nor deny to his constituents that he voted for a controversial bill. It takes 20 percent of a house to force a roll-call vote. From the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 5: "the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal."
Who's representing the US in the ACTA negotiations. If it's just the usual **AA people, then good luck getting this past The Senate.
The DMCA made it past the Senate, as did the PATRIOT act, the war on (some) drugs, Prohibition, and I believe the Corwin Amendment. I feel your faith in the Senate is misplaced. You see, to have real influence in the Senate, you must either be someone with enough cash to make a difference in an election, such as a CEO, or you must be someone who represents a collection of people that have that power, such as union bosses.
SSC
This will be debated.
No, it won't.
The treaty will be rejected if it's as bad as we're fearing.
No, it won't.
What are we worried about?
We're worried about the fact that ACTA is not a treaty but rather an executive agreement, inter alia. This means that no Senate approval or Congressional oversight of any kind is required. The only limits are that the agreement has to be within the bounds of current U.S. law. Of course, coloring within the lines of judge-made case-law is hard to do, it closes off policy options for the future, and the primary concern many people have is the extent to which ACTA will be forcing US IP policy onto other countries (all the while leaving out the good parts of our law, like fair use).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
They didn't undo half of the things that the Dems have done for years that they have opposed from time to time (such as their opposition to the New Deal in the 30s), and the Dems have also done little in the way of repealing themselves. I am awaiting the death of the PATRIOT act, for example, and the closure of Guantanamo Bay's prison. So why do you think they would repeal it now?
SSC
As a current US Army reserve soldier let me tell you:
An American Revolution is most definitely possible in modern society for two reasons:
The US Army is not supposed to put down armed uprisings unless it is on a massive scale, you only have to fight the police at first.
By the time it gets big enough they start calling up the Nat'l guard and what have you, you'll have as many soldiers defecting to revolt.
It's even more possible now with a lot of our top end equipment and soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan.
As for the technological gap between the Army and the civilian population, well the Iraqis don't have drone fighters and are still doing a decent job of killing soldiers.
IDG covers the latest Dutch leak that reveals the transparency position of many ACTA participants. Particularly telling is the view that both France and Italy favour greater transparency, but fear U.S. retaliation.
Here's an important block of text... Moreover, the U.S. has remained silent on the issue.
This is a more telling block of text :
IDG covers the latest Dutch leak that reveals the transparency position of many ACTA participants. Particularly telling is the view that both France and Italy favour greater transparency, but fear U.S. retaliation.
... , to the very people who elected them, require consensus? Shouldn't it be opacity that requires unanimous consensus?
Seriously, people, how much more clue do you need that "reform" isn't going to cut it? Only another "R" word is going to put an end to this. If you're not firing up the furnace and making ready to beat your plowshares into swords, you're not doing enough.
You know, I seem to recall hearing that word a lot the past 2 years, but now? Eh, not so much.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's not a law, it's a treaty. Treaties are much better than laws on their own because while laws can easily be opposed by the public before being passed, treaties can be passed in secret and then used as a basis for forcing laws through on the grounds that they are a requirement of the treaty.
because if you don't understand how much worse an actual revolution is compared to the issues here, that's what you are
when peoples bellies are empty, then you get revolution. if they can't download cartoon network for free, not so much
and i say this as someone who has said in many comments on this site that intellectual property is morally and philosophically bankrupt. but i still know the entire debate over intellectual property nowhere rises to the level of revolution, not even remotely. if you think it does, you are extremely, extremely out of touch with what is really important in this world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
solving this problem is not a matter of throwing a revolution and then everything is golden forever more
its more like a policing duty, a constant lowgrade effort at taking out the trash
in your home, do you declare a revolution on garbage and then forever more there's no more garbage?
no, no matter what you do, you need to take out the garbage every thursday. likewise in a democracy, there will be a constant crop of assholes who get power and don't deserve it. how do you get rid of them? YOU VOTE THEM OUT
this is what makes a democracy so much better than other governments: you don't NEED a revolution to get a new regime
so stop advocating for revolution, which is FAR FAR worse on ANY scale of abuse and damage than ANY problem you can describe facing us today
if you don't understand that, then you are 11 years old, and your lack of life experience is excused, or you're an adult idiot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Democrat-controlled Senate just reapproved key provisions of the Patriot Act that would otherwise have expired. If you wanted any indicator that they're worse than useless, that was it.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
For clarification, the Supreme Court ruling did not so much grant any new rights to corporations as it did close a loophole that allowed Big Content, but not other businesses, to publish advertisements by means of owning their own media outlets. While I'm with most to jump on the anti-corporate bandwagon, many a slashdotter will agree that more free speech for all is universally better than less. When we start taking free speech away from those we don't want having it, we're really no better than the corporations who do the exact same thing.
you offer, and agree with all of them
now i am asking you to understand why a real world REVOLUTION is far, far worse
in terms of devastation to personal lives on a massive scale, in terms of massive amounts of injustice, and most importantly in terms of the complete unpredictability of a final outcome in terms of who actually winds up on power: usually exactly the kind of asshole you complain about in our current government, times 1000 times worse
if you take your head out of your fanboy ass and your romantic fiction, you will realize that a real world revolution is just about the worst state a country can ever be in, and people ONLY turn to revolution if they can't feed themselves
and i am not debating your points, i am telling you what should be, for anyone intelligent, an obviously truthful historical fact about what a revolution really is
i am openly insulting you with the words "retard" and "idiot" because that is exactly what you are if you romanticize revolution
revolution is evil, ugly, brutal, murderous and completely undesirable
that you openly call for it, when your complaints about our government don't even begin to approach by many orders of magnitude a valid call for revolution, means you are, genuinely, a complete moron
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we would not have invaded iraq
meaning the parties genuinely are different and that obama coming after bush represents genuine regime change
if you say the parties are same, or advertising controls all of our thinking, you are replacing intelligence with empty cynicism
furthermore, the people actually voted for gore in 2000, and it was a structural fault that led to the weaker candidate taking the white house
meaning those irrational people made the wiser decision all along, and the system, which we have to fix, can result in a cleaner expression of democracy, never perfect, but better than anything else in this world you can possibly hope for
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I had the same argument with a British coworker last year. He was convinced that Bush was going to somehow unleash "battle-hardened" troops on the American public and make himself America's dictator instead of heading home to Texas on Obama's inauguration day. After I finished laughing, I informed him that scenario was about as likely to happen as Prince Charles having his sons and mom murdered so he could be king before he died... then proceeded to explain why both scenarios were completely ridiculous.
Among other things, if one blindly assumes that every person classified by Wikipedia as an active-duty member of the US Armed Forces is a soldier capable of urban warfare, and that every single one is available for instantaneous deployment -- without support services -- across the US, there are *almost* enough to send 25 soldiers to every zipcode. Pit them against a population that values freedom, celebrates gun ownership, and generally practices large-scale civil disobedience even in normal daily life (speed limits, sales tax on out-of-state purchases, drug usage, underage drinking, you name it), and even if you assume the government has somehow managed to secure 100% complete blind obedience from its soldiers, they'd be hopelessly-outgunned and overpowered before they managed to park the Humvee and turn on the megaphone. God *himself* couldn't successfully impose martial law on an uncooperative American public ;-)
No one because all you armchair freedom fighters are too much of pussies to actually do anything besides posturing on the internet.
The reason for the widespread compliance within the population is not because they are all wimps. Revolution is like amputation. You only amputate your leg if you really have to. If wounded in the leg, and given the choice to do nothing, or amputate it, most people will adopt a wait and see approach - it's not that bad just yet.
Whereas real healing lies in the utilisation of other, finer instruments - the scalpel, the antibiotic, the anaesthetic. In the context of government it is by wielding the fine instrument that you overpower the powerful in their entrenched power bases. These fine instruments are things like:
These are a hard slog. And lot's of people like to complain, but are too lazy to do their duty, to step up to the table and fix what is wrong. So the solution is to call for revolution. Blowing the dog whistle of revolution justifies doing nothing - after all, they did their civic duty by blowing the whistle, who would ask more of them? The revolutionary whistle is like a relief valve - there's a problem, hearts and minds are stirred - pressure builds up - someone calls for revolution - no we can't do that, it's not justified - the relief valve opens and the pressure is gone. People go home to bed, and in the morning, pay their due to their masters.
Ironically, the US love of guns and the kneejerk tendency to suggest violence as the solution to issues of governance means that of all the democracies in the world, the US population is amongst the most compliant of all populations toward their government.