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Obama Backs MPAA, RIAA, and ACTA
boarder8925 writes "In a move sure to surprise no one, Obama has come out on the side of the MPAA/RIAA and has backed the ACTA: 'We're going to aggressively protect our intellectual property,' Obama said in his speech, 'Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people [...] It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it's only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can't just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.'"
Next up: The Texas schoolboard mandates that textbooks 'de-emphasise' the RECORDED HISTORICAL FACT that Hollywood was founded on industrialised copyright infringement.
despite i have been a staunch supporter of him and quarreled with my conservative american friends for close to a year since his candidacy to his election and even beyond.
really, from this point on, i dont think i will be hypocritical to defend him in any regard. there are things that can be overlooked and forgiven, noone is perfect. but ransoming rights and liberties of the thought process to private individuals is nothing less than feudalism at its best. and someone who can justify this to himself cannot be defended in anything else.
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Actually assuming you have a particular way you go about accomplishing your job, it might actually be patentable.
I remember not long ago some company was trying to patent how they ran their business, something to do with how to schedule and conduct the business meetings I believe.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
We sure know how to pick 'em.
When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
IP is going to be the foundation of any future economy.
IP is just various monopoly rights. See the former Soviet union on how well monopolies work. Monopolies are antithetical to an effective economy and thus will not be a foundation, but a burden.
it'll be up to our inventions and our software and our innovation in exporting ideas
Please. IP is mainly good for extracting resources out of an economy, it has nothing to do with 'exporting'. Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy, and most of the time (certainly in the case of the US), the monopoly rights will be held by foreign corporations.
The only way forward is to make western economies competitive again. Repealing at the very least copyright and patents would be a good start towards reestablishing a highly competitive free market and lowering the burden on western labour (thus reducing their price).
In a perfect world, more production per unit of labor would mean that we would all have to work less to achieve the same level of prosperity. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the U.S. because our current intellectual property laws allow a relatively few people to take the lion's share of the benefit from the production being done.
Not just IP laws. The fact that a lot of industrial manufacturing is capital intensive combined with the relatively small segment of social networks that access to capital flows in. Or, as Marx might have said, most workers don't own the means of production under a capitalist system. Go back in time and reduce patent and copyright protections circa 1910 or even 1810 (where the benefits were more limited) and story of how the gains in the system play out for labor is pretty much going to be the same.
It's not that copyright and patent laws don't represent another barrier to entry: they sometimes do. But most of the time, they pretty much protect industrial competitors from other would-be industrial competitors.
We software geeks tend to see things a bit differently because for the last 20-30 years, we're one of the few groups lucky enough to be in an industry where we do more or less own the means of production (got a computer? And a compiler? Or interpreter for a capable language? Congratulations! You have production capacity!) because it's relatively affordable. So our barriers to entry are less about capital and more about other things like product awareness, network effects... and cost of compliance with the law, including copyright & patent law.
Maybe this will become more important in the future if it turns out that more industrial capacity becomes available for ownership down at the household level, and that's reason enough to make sure copyright and patent law are a balance bargain rather than a giveaway to lawyers and other people whose sense of entitlement is so great that they really, genuinely view ideas as genuine property, and so I think fighting against ACTA and its ilk are worthwhile... but let's not kid ourselves, copyrights and patents haven't really been the main tool of abuse in the relationship between capital and labor.
Tweet, tweet.
I thought cartels were generally considered illegal. By supporting these entities he is essentially supporting the notion of legal cartels. I think the USA is going to become more and more isolated in its point of views.
I had great hope for some real change when Obama came in, but he standing shows that there isn't really much separating the Democrats and the Republicans. For me, it really goes to show the whole notion of democracy in the states is more about changing the logo of the party in charge, rather than anything else. Which ever party is in charge, it is still the corporations which hold them by the balls. What it will take to institute a government which is by the people for the people, rather than by the people for the corporations.
I have nothing against copyright, rather I disagree with copyrights going beyond a reasonable amount of time.
One question I do have, is what will the reaction of the open source community be in 70 years when the first copyrights of Linux become public domain? This is not a indication of support for long copyrights, but trying to understand the reaction of the community when the shoe is on the other foot.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yes, ACTA is aimed towards giving IP laws more power, globally. But how much do you think countries with real problems care about protecting IP laws from countries they don't care about?
From the position of the MPAA and RIAA there are several different positions that they care about or don't. Russians and Chinese copying music and movies isn't a big problem - those countries have always had large scale piracy operations and undeveloped IP markets, and the potential profit margins are thin or non-existant. If this were to change, then there would be an opportunity to develop new markets, which the RIAA/MPAA would be interested in. But at the moment the markets are lost. The real global battlefield is in the European Union - a larger market economy than the USA, where the average price for a DVD or CD is much higher than the US, and with a voracious appetite for American produced content. If groups like the Pirate Party begin to make serious headway in scaling back European copyright, then the RIAA/MPAA is going to lose control over one of its most profitable markets. The other market they really care about is (obviously) the USA. It is not such a large battlefield since U.S. laws are already more MPAA/RIAA friendly. By agreeing to a global copyright enforcement treaty, that is supported by American corporations, they will be able to easily pass legislation with broad cross-party support, and with little room for debate because the details have "already been agreed and signed" before being considered at the level of national law.
Because its consumers have to hand money to the IP owners abroad, with nothing to little coming back in return.
Have you got any idea how much money is spent by European consumers and businesses on U.S. software, movies, books, films etc?
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea
that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the
public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged
with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing
circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is
supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or
individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock
of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
No sig today...
Question: Now that all the manufacturing jobs are all but a memory, what exactly are you going to do with those millions of out of work Americans who don't have the creative ability to "make IP" huh? There are literally millions of them, can't speak for the rest of the country but the south is quickly becoming nothing but dead towns with boarded up homes.
You gonna pay them to sit at home and consume IP? No money for IP working at Mickey D, hell most places you'll be lucky to keep a roof over your head. So what are you gonna do with them? Kinda pointless to try educating them, as we have seen in the tech sector they'll ship the white collar jobs off shore just as quick. So what exactly do you do with these teaming masses in your magical IP economy, which stuff all the money in a few pockets at the top, while the rest can go get fucked?
Better think quick, as all these oath takers and other bunches gathering guns ain't doing it because they are happy little campers you know. All it is gonna take is another Stalin or Hitler, that is a good speaker and can rally the masses to say "see those rich bastards? Why the hell should we be living like dirt while those blood sucking leeches live like kings? let's just kill those pigs and take it back!" to have everything in your IP economy turn into a shit storm. Don't forget multinational corporations have NO loyalty to you, this country, or anyone but themselves.
You got millions out of work, millions of poor, pissed off individuals, many of whom have pretty much become completely disgusted by the greed and corporation kissing like we see in TFA. Frankly I don't think it would take much to light the powderkeg ATM. Wish it wasn't so, but that is what happens when your leaders develop a "let them eat cake" mentality. And we saw how well it turned out for the last ones that had that attitude, didn't we? Don't think it can't happen again, because when you are bankrupt, with no job and no hope, and your life is nothing but shit, what have you got to lose?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is completely misleading. These numbers include goods produced by nominally American corporations even if all the work is done by employees based outside of the US. This particular scam has been debunked multiple times by the business press.
BTW, the US GDP numbers also include goods produced outside the USA by non-American labor.
If you strip out the work/products made by non-US employees of US corporations, you'll see that both the US GDP and exports have been in steep decline for the past decade.
Magnus.