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Why Google, Bing, Yahoo Should Fear ACTA
littlekorea writes "US intellectual property law expert Jonathan Band has warned that Silicon Valley's search engines, hosting companies, and e-commerce giants have much to fear from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, negotiations for which continued in Switzerland today. The fear for search engines in particular is the erosion of 'fair use' protections and introduction of statutory damages, both of which could lead to more copyright claims from rights holders." The article links a marked-up ACTA draft (PDF) that Band and a coalition of library organizations and rights groups believe is more balanced. Quoting Band: "Our high-level concern is that ACTA does not reflect the balance in US IP law, [which] contains strong protections and strong exceptions. ACTA exports only the strong protections, but not the strong exceptions."
the problem with this sentiment is that I have (many) friends who, because they can, allot 0 dollars for entertainment and download every movie, song and game they want from the torrents. They then use that 100-200 dollars that would otherwise have been entertainment funds to buy more pot, better brands of cigarettes or a better brand of beer/beer at a more expensive bar depending on their preferred method of intoxication.
You make a very good case, but you miss one very important point. As the record and movie companies have increased their emphasis that downloading unauthorized copies of their products is illegal I have decreased the amount that I do it to the point that I no longer do so at all. At the same time, I have also decreased the amount of their product that I buy, which has also reached zero.
My failure to buy is not because I cannot afford to. It is not because I don't want to give my money to such jerks. It is because I just can't be bothered to find out whether the product they are selling is good enough to spend my money on.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison