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ACTA Text Leaks; US Caves On ISPs, Seeks Super-DMCA

An anonymous reader writes "Given the history of ACTA leaks, to no one's surprise, the latest version of the draft agreement (PDF) was leaked last night on KEI's website. The new version — which reflects changes made during an intense week of negotiations last month in Washington — shows a draft agreement that is much closer to becoming reality. Perhaps the most important story of the latest draft is how the countries are close to agreement on the Internet enforcement chapter. In the face of opposition, the US has dropped its demands on secondary liability for ISPs but is still holding out hope of establishing a super-DMCA with digital lock rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by US courts."

246 comments

  1. Copyright Law Reform by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We only get once chance to defeat ACTA.

    --
    "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    1. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unless we defeat it. Then we'll get another chance, ad infinitum, like one of those timeless creatures of evil that will never truly die.

    2. Re:Copyright Law Reform by daem0n1x · · Score: 1, Informative

      Hey, you should be glad you don't live in Cuba, with all that Internet censorship and vigilance. Democracy rules!

    3. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      why should I care about ACTA? Every time this comes up on slashdot, everyone is against it, but I never see an explanation why.

      Looking VERY briefly at the links, it looks like it is just an agreement between a bunch of countries that all participating countries will pass a DMCA-type law. The US already has a DMCA law, and if ACTA comes about, wouldn't that just mean that other countries have to have DMCA?

      Also, at least for the US, has the 'chance to defeat' passed?

    4. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The US already has a DMCA law, and if ACTA comes about, wouldn't that just mean that other countries have to have DMCA?

      Let me guess... you're American aren't you? Why should the rest of the world have to suffer under the same shitty IP regime you guys have?

    5. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1

      DMCA has it all wrong to start with. A Super-DMCA will only be worse. And, even if I have to live with shitty, unethical laws, why should some kid in Rwanda, or New Zealand have to live with the same oppressive laws? "Also, at least for the US, has the 'chance to defeat' passed?" Not sure what you mean here - but I'm awfully damned sure that when all these criminals have "approved" of this treaty, then Congress will just rubber stamp the damned thing. They are actually doing an end run around the courts, embodying into a treaty things that the courts have already rejected as unconstitutional.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    6. Re:Copyright Law Reform by capnkr · · Score: 1

      Unless we defeat it. Then we'll get another chance, ad infinitum, like one of those timeless creatures of evil that will never truly die.

      Dammit. I thought we'd heard the last of SCO and Darl...

      --
      "...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
    7. Re:Copyright Law Reform by failedlogic · · Score: 1

      Are you American? If yes, then that is partly why you're not as concerned. There are many countries that don't have similar laws that are within ACTA, let alone DMCA type laws. Its also going to be much harder to defeat ACTA if copyright and IP laws are standardized across many countries.

    8. Re:Copyright Law Reform by phoomp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What is this "chance to defeat ACTA" of which you speak? The process has been specifically designed to keep us excluded it's too far along to change. At this point, the best we can hope for is wisdom from countries that are less concerned about the freedoms of their corporations and more concerned about the freedoms of their citizens.

    9. Re:Copyright Law Reform by macraig · · Score: 2, Insightful

      True evil is always Undead.

    10. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's the price of Liberty, eternal vigilance.

    11. Re:Copyright Law Reform by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What is this "chance to defeat ACTA" of which you speak? The process has been specifically designed to keep us excluded it's too far along to change.

      At this point, the best we can hope for is wisdom from countries that are less concerned about the freedoms of their corporations and more concerned about the freedoms of their citizens.

      You're obviously new to Earth.

      --
      "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    12. Re:Copyright Law Reform by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 1

      Too true.

      --
      "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    13. Re:Copyright Law Reform by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 1

      If/When ACTA passes, I might as well live in Cuba for all I'll be able to do. Just the act of loading a web page will become infringing (hyperbole right now for sure, but probably not too exaggerated to be out of the realm of possibility in the near future).

      --
      "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    14. Re:Copyright Law Reform by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I am American and am very concerned.

      --
      "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    15. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      wwwwwooooooooooshhhhhh

    16. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Khyber · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "We only get once chance to defeat ACTA."

      No we don't. We have several chances, the most likely one being a full-out armed insurgence against the government.

      Remember Mr Discovery Building and what he said? There will be bloodshed coming very soon.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    17. Re:Copyright Law Reform by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 1

      Let's pray the military is evenly split against the government, otherwise we don't have a chance.

      --
      "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    18. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Khyber · · Score: 3, Interesting

      'The process has been specifically designed to keep us excluded it's too far along to change'

      You FORCE inclusion of yourself by holding the fucks responsible for this hostage or killing them outright.

      Let me point you to the two places you need to go - Hollywood, and the Northeastern USA.

      These two places are responsible for this. If you KILL THEM, this nonsense will go away.

      It's that simple.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    19. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Members of the European Parliament can endorse the Written Declaration 12 and ACTA provisions for political corruption may be unlawful.

    20. Re:Copyright Law Reform by digitalunity · · Score: 1

      Thats kind of a big problem with our legal system and how laws are treated. Treaties roughly have the legal force of a constitutional amendment, but congress crooks can do it without us getting a chance to vote.

      It's an end run around the people too. Sadly, we're often ignored. I've only talked to a few people offline who are even aware of what the DMCA is, but of those who know, all are against it. If congress tried to pass a super-DMCA the more traditional legislative way now, people would probably be very pissed off but congress could pass it anyway.

      --
      You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
    21. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Roman+Coder · · Score: 1

      Nah, he's just new to the Human Race.

      --
      "The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
    22. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What is this "chance to defeat ACTA" of which you speak? The process has been specifically designed to keep us excluded it's too far along to change.

      At this point, the best we can hope for is wisdom from countries that are less concerned about the freedoms of their corporations and more concerned about the freedoms of their citizens.

      What has ACTA got to do with freedom for corporations? They are not protecting corporate freedom, they are empowering them to control thought and expression.

    23. Re:Copyright Law Reform by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Signing a treaty to do X means the US is obligated to do X.
      But the US still has to pass legislation that covers X through the normal process.

    24. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Richard+Steiner · · Score: 1

      The sad part is that it's our own system that is being gamed, and many of those who are in power seem to have a vested interest in not changing the status quo.

      --
      Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
      The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
    25. Re:Copyright Law Reform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mr. Discovery there I think was ridiculously optimistic. Bloodshed would require people to... y'know... do something. The vast, vast, vast majority never will. And even if some organization tried to gather up a group of like-minded people to rebel, it would be crushed long before it had a chance to organize.

    26. Re:Copyright Law Reform by sumdumass · · Score: 1

      Remember Mr Discovery Building and what he said? There will be bloodshed coming very soon.

      Mr Discovery building was right. Unfortunately he predictions were clear enough to tell him it would be his if he did something that stupid.

      Whatever you are thinking, make sure it's something you are willing to die for as that will most likely be the cost if you are taking any cues from that leftwing nutjob.

    27. Re:Copyright Law Reform by digitalunity · · Score: 1

      Indeed, but treaties are negotiated behind closed doors away from the prying eyes of the public. Once the treaties are signed, congress often ratifies them with laws that are very similar to the treaty we signed.

      I don't like how treaties are negotiated. I really don't like congress either, but that's only because they're all a bunch of pandering morons. In theory congress could work much better.

      --
      You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
    28. Re:Copyright Law Reform by rastos1 · · Score: 1

      you're American aren't you? Why should the rest of the world have to suffer under the same shitty IP regime you guys have?

      Because it usually does. Voluntarily (at least as far as lawmakers are concerned). And it's actually not restricted only to IP either.

    29. Re:Copyright Law Reform by FrellMeDead · · Score: 1

      What the hell are you talking about Northeastern USA? Except for Washington D.C. the rest of this crap came from Hollywood/California where most (not all) media industries are headquartered for the most part. Screw the companies and the inidividuals don't just blame whole sections of the USA for no reason (especially since D.C. isn't really Northeastern USA). As far as the rest , sure why not. Screw those idiots that cause this mess especially considering the media industries are pharma corps to some degree are behind/controlling this act. On e of the reasons regular, non tech inclined people don't fight back/complain about ACTA is simply because they either haven't heard about it or have been misled as to what it is for/what is supposed to do, or even been partly informed by local news (even the BBC America has misrepresented what ACTA is and what it's for) and led to believd that it is to protect people from bad products/drugs and blame piracy for everyone's problems/sales decline. Now the average person would get confused especially if not technically inclined to actually fined out more info online. Additionally it's not just the USA that are responsible for this (yes they have pushed for it), other countries media industries & pharma, copyright groups are really the ones responsible (not jus the USA, groups all over the world). Just make sure to actually blame those resonsible especially since there has been enough misinformation pushed out by the ACTA assholes.

  2. Surely not by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Funny

    ACTA Text Leaks

    Surely not. That would be infringing their copyright.

    1. Re:Surely not by Hardolaf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

      http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105 It's not copyrighted.

    2. Re:Surely not by angelwolf71885 · · Score: 0

      someone should patent something similar to the ACTA then sue the world for infringing on there patents

    3. Re:Surely not by m.ducharme · · Score: 1

      In the US.

      --
      Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
    4. Re:Surely not by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      Fortunately the only copyright law that applies to the US is US copyright law.

      Duh.

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    5. Re:Surely not by TheoMurpse · · Score: 1

      Of course, ACTA isn't a work of the US government.

    6. Re:Surely not by tepples · · Score: 1

      Fortunately the only copyright law that applies to the US is US copyright law.

      Unless your business headquartered in the United States ships worldwide. Then the foreign country's customs will confiscate your company's products that violate its law, and you'll get chargebacks against your merchant account.

  3. **sigh** by skyride · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The goverment officials dealing with this have absolutely no understanding of how this law will affect the world for generations to come.

    We're getting awfully close to needing the 4th box...

    1. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The US isn't the world. China won't give a shit, and they are building the military hardware to allow them to continue not giving a shit for generations to come.

    2. Re:**sigh** by rotide · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure they do. Their children, children's children, and so on will benefit from all the money the corporate lobbying has brought. Oh, you mean the world that also resides outside the paid for politicians? The officials don't really pay much attention unless it's election time. Damnit, I wish that was hyperbole.

    3. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The goverment officials dealing with this have absolutely no understanding of how this law will affect the world for generations to come.

      What makes you think any politician is interested in the future?

    4. Re:**sigh** by jonwil · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The officials dont pay attention even when it IS election time (remember the US mid-term elections are comming up soon).

      Heck, even if GOD himself came down from heaven, stood in front of congress and asked for an end to draconian copyright and IP policies, the congressmen and senators would STILL favor the large briefcases full of money they get from Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Universal etc.

    5. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      It's gonna be "funny", when China will be the new safe haven for western values, such as liberty.

    6. Re:**sigh** by hedwards · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In this one area, and mostly because if the Chinese people had to actually pay for the property like the rest of us they'd be much more likely to be pissed off about how the Chinese government is purposely keeping them in poverty.

    7. Re:**sigh** by Haedrian · · Score: 1

      ACTA is discussed by:

      Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States.

      Which is pretty much the more important countries and factions of the world.

      ACTA isn't JUST about internet filesharing, but also about counterfeint pharmacuticals and other stuff. So keep that in context/

    8. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

      Yeah it'll be used to deny people cheap generic drugs as well!

    9. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What makes you think any politician is interested in the future?

      Oh they are VERY interested in the future, especially the interest today's bribes will generate in the future. Corrupt scumbags.

    10. Re:**sigh** by russotto · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's gonna be "funny", when China will be the new safe haven for western values, such as liberty.

      That would be funny. But it isn't going to happen. Instead, there will be NO safe haven for liberty. Just a boot, stomping on a human face, forever, as Orwell would have it.

    11. Re:**sigh** by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      China won't be the safe haven for liberty, they'll just have a different implementation of oppression.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    12. Re:**sigh** by nabsltd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ACTA isn't JUST about internet filesharing, but also about counterfeint pharmacuticals and other stuff.

      You, sir, are the dream of the ACTA negotiators.

      The whole point of bundling "file sharing" with "counterfeit pharmaceuticals" is so that you can get the same sort of penalties for both. I don't think anyone will disagree that labeling sugar pills as some vital drug is a huge danger, but the way ACTA is written, a generic is also considered "counterfeit". Likewise all the following are treated the same by ACTA:

      • file sharing
      • copying DVDs
      • copying DVDs and selling them
      • creating your own DVD, labeling it as if it were the legitimate DVD and selling it
    13. Re:**sigh** by thunderclap · · Score: 1

      Unless, Cnn was broadcasting those large briefcase burning everytime someone touched them. Fear is a great motivator. IF he was physicaly standing there they would do what ever HE said because one one example working..

    14. Re:**sigh** by DeKO · · Score: 1

      Oh, you mean the world that also resides outside the paid for politicians? The officials don't really pay much attention unless it's election time.

      Then what if we had elections every 2 months?

    15. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe, us Americans have to actually pay for property, but we dont seem to be to pissed off about how the US government is purposely keeping most of this country in poverty. But then again we all have television, what else do we need?

    16. Re:**sigh** by WillDraven · · Score: 3, Funny

      They would probably tell god that his residence in the holy land 2000 years ago disqualifies him for US citizenship and thus he has no standing to sue.

      --
      This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
    17. Re:**sigh** by Lanteran · · Score: 1
      or maybe liberty (the short story right to read comes to mind) will make space the new colonial America.

      Right to read:http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

      --
      "People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
    18. Re:**sigh** by jambarama · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You've stumbled onto the reason Larry Lessig left copyright reform to study government corruption.

    19. Re:**sigh** by PinkyGigglebrain · · Score: 2, Insightful

      4th box ...

      and lots of them.
      ~

    20. Re:**sigh** by 0111+1110 · · Score: 1

      Human nature. If the evil corps were handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in briefcases, would you turn them down? I aint no Howard Roark. I would take the money. I don't think many of us would have the kind of integrity to refuse. The only thing that might give me pause is if they wanted the death penalty for file sharing. Since they can't tie an IP address to an individual, entire families would have to be put to death, maybe even without a trial, to save time and unnecessary expense. They'd have to pay me a lot more for that kind of draconian law, but I'd probably still do it.

      --
      Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
    21. Re:**sigh** by Shark · · Score: 1

      They'd have to pay me a lot more for that kind of draconian law, but I'd probably still do it.

      Until it's your family...

      --
      Mind the frickin' laser...
    22. Re:**sigh** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny thing, I posted in a popular Singapore based tech site about ACTA and either nobody cares, or nobody was even aware about it.

      That was extremely disappointing.

      But I guess the general Singaporean is pretty apathic till it bites them in the ass.

    23. Re:**sigh** by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I aint no Howard Roark. I would take the money. I don't think many of us would have the kind of integrity to refuse.

      Why? Are you starving? Homeless? Or would you spend it on a fancy car, a house that's bigger than you really need etc? Not trying to flame, I'm honestly curious. I for one prefer being able to look in the mirror over a big chunk of cash...

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
    24. Re:**sigh** by Drishmung · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Sorry, times have moved on since then.

      The current prospect is that you also get to pay for the privilege of having your face stomped.

      --
      Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
    25. Re:**sigh** by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 0, Troll

      My, my, 4 of my posts modded down "overrated" tonight. I must be doing something right pissing off the lunatics.

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
    26. Re:**sigh** by shentino · · Score: 1

      Methinks that the main bill is about pharmaceuticals and the like, with draconian anti-sharing as a rider tacked on by special interests.

    27. Re:**sigh** by sexconker · · Score: 1

      copying DVDs and selling them

      creating your own DVD, labeling it as if it were the legitimate DVD and selling it

      What if I made and sold a copy of "Be Kind Rewind"?
      Do I get off on some sort of double jeopardy thing?

    28. Re:**sigh** by BoogieChile · · Score: 1

      Yes...Let's not forget the right of the pharmaceutical companies to force third-world nations to pay first-world licencing fees

  4. Time to get encryption working by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 3, Informative

    Now is really the time to get encrypted, decentralized networks with Onion routing working at a practical level and not just for academic enjoyment. I've had great expectations in GNUnet, but apparently it is pretty hard to port. Freenet has also never convinced me whenever I tried it. Are the technical obstacles really so hard to overcome? What about pervasive email encryption with automatic installation and more widespread use of SSL? What is holding all these technologies back?

    1. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's holding them back? Lack of need.
       
      The underground thrives and flourishes when the day comes that people can't get by without it.

    2. Re:Time to get encryption working by disi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      To run an Onion node is prohibited in several countries (e.g. in Germany).
      just two examples:
      German police raid home of man who operated Tor server
      German Cops Raid Home of Wikileaks and Tor Volunteer
      I heard of others in forums, where the police put down whole server farms -.-
      welcome to the real world...

    3. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mainly issue holding use back: wide adoption need for it to be useful.

      No regulations for crypto from government, cause they do want to keep reading our communication. Why push for security when that makes It harder for yourself?

      People need to understand that they should choose SSL when available and then force more and more sites to use SSL. Then we should switch to some soft of onion routing, and force site after site to switch.. but this requires the users to switch.. and that will never happen :-/

    4. Re:Time to get encryption working by hitmark · · Score: 1

      Not being turned on by default in any of the major os installs?

      If gmail, outlook, and whatever gets used on ox and ubuntu had it enabled by default, so that the public key was attached to every email sent to new address, and every address with a known public key got a encrypted mail, then perhaps it would happen.

      But as it is, people have to make a conscious choice about using encrypted email, and so it just do not happen. Hell, people do not use seat belts even tho it takes perhaps just a extra second or two, and you expect them to use encrypted email by personal choice rather then default?

      --
      comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
    5. Re:Time to get encryption working by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Encrypted is not really complicated, use https sites and turn encryption on in your torrent client. Anonymity is hard, really hard. For open P2P networks encryption without anonymity doesn't really help anything, everyone can connect and collect data as a peer. Some of the issues are:

      1. Anything like TOR and Freenet has lots of overhead due to relaying
      2. Latency is also hurt, and it's also dangerous for timing attacks
      3. You can collect statistical data, it's difficult to hide patterns
      4. You can "isolate" nodes and then track all their traffic

      On top of that, you get endless amounts of flak for being a "free haven" for all sorts of $boogeymen. That drives away developers, users, funding, everything. Many people would actually prefer they caught "real" criminals rather than create the true information anarchy. Total anonymity means no consequences, so on top of those you get endless waves of spam and trolls and they can post far more offensive things than they could on slashdot. If someone created it, you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    6. Re:Time to get encryption working by thijsh · · Score: 1

      Problems holding this back now:
      - Onion routing: has too little exit nodes and too many hops severely reducing the available bandwidth. The throughput and latency are too high to replace the internet for anything but basic sites and communication.
      - Pervasive email encryption: requires cooperation from a lot of parties, who have their own interest in reading your mail (Google with advertising for example). It will only work when you can reliably send encrypted mail to anyone and know for sure they will be able to read it.
      - More widespread use of SSL: requires self-signed certificates to be accepted by mayor browsers as an intermediate security between insecure HTTP and validated HTTPS. Currently they are all unwilling to recognize SSC HTTPS as 'somewhat more secure than HTTP'.
      - VPN darknet: requires relatively expensive centralized infrastructure to be of any useful size, although you could create an internet of smaller darknets by some means of VPN peering. But you might run into bandwidth issues again...

      I do not know any other factors that hold these technologies back from the top of my head now, but i'm fairly sure some other Slashdotters can amend (and no doubt correct) this list.

    7. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its unwelcome but not prohibited yet.

    8. Re:Time to get encryption working by countertrolling · · Score: 1

      What is holding all these technologies back?

      The possibility of being flogged for your password? The fact that your ISP can simply drop encrypted bits? You still need a reliable and secure medium to transmit. That does not exist yet. The real obstacles are political, not technical.

      --
      For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
    9. Re:Time to get encryption working by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Another problem with end-to-end encryption of email is that it is largely incompatible with webmail. My mail server uses SMTPS and IMAPS to talk to my client. It will talk TLS to any remote mail server that supports the STARTTLS extension. The only parties that can intercept mail sent in this way are those operating the servers, those who compromise the server, and those who compromise either the sending or receiving client. If you use end-to-end encryption, you reduce this to those who compromise the clients. If you add webmail back in then the sending and receiving clients become the sending and receiving server - you need to store your key on the server (or provide the key at each login to some code provided by the server), so you don't get any more security than if the you use HTTPS for the webmail and SMTPS for inter-server communication. The person operating the webmail server can still read your emails.

      One option that you leave out is IPsec with keys public distributed via DNS. Now that DNSSEC is enabled in the root zone, it's possible to deploy a DNS record containing the IPsec key for a machine. You can then establish a secure encrypted connection to that machine at the IP layer, underneath any other protocol.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:Time to get encryption working by pyrosine · · Score: 1

      Check out anomos for encrpyted, anonymous file sharing

    11. Re:Time to get encryption working by Nursie · · Score: 1

      SSC is only more secure if you've exchanged keys offline, otherwise it doesn't protect against MITM attacks. Somewhat more secure? Maybe, but still wide open.

    12. Re:Time to get encryption working by meringuoid · · Score: 1
      you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy

      'Would'? Where've you been for the last five years? hello.jpg is positively vanilla by modern standards. People nowadays link you to 2girls1cup, 3guys1hammer, SWAP.AVI, Pain Olympics, anythingatall.on.nimp.org, cp, beheadings, mutilations, massacres, cat burnings, witch burnings... If you're still thinking of good old goatse as the worst thing in the world, wow. Go and hang around on the Russian chans, you'll find what you describe has long since come to pass.

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
    13. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Problem with those projects is that (popularity-wise) they are attempting something futile: getting absolute anonymity with immense price in bandwidth, latency and overall cost to the network.

      To achieve world domination the prime objective of the network should be to be _more_ effective than the internet rather than less so. While "total anonymity to everyone" is incompatible with that, we can go pretty far with "reasonable anonymity for everyone plus a special checkbox for the paranoid".

      Regarding spam etc, such anonymity means just that negative karma isn't useful so you just have to start requiring positive karma if you don't want to drown in junk. (so byebye anonymous coward and welcome "ac12345 with marginal amount of trust from ac54321 and ac6789")

    14. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      "1. Anything like TOR and Freenet has lots of overhead due to relaying"
      True, but you can get speeds above what you would get from 56k dialup modems on current designs (I2P, Freenet, Tor). If the Internet was already useful when everyone only had 56k, an anonymous network at 56k is not completely useless.

      "2. Latency is also hurt, and it's also dangerous for timing attacks"
      You get more latency in general, yes. In the case of Freenet, data that is often accessed gets cached more often, eventually reducing latency to access such data; also, due to the fact that data insertion/retrieval is asynchronous, timing/correlation attacks are not trivial even if you control several nodes.

      "3. You can collect statistical data, it's difficult to hide patterns"
      Depends on your threat model, but even assuming a powerful attacker which can see all data flowing between ALL nodes (a very strong assumption), garlic routing, adding chaff and increasing latencies can help. Also, this depends on the network design, number of nodes and the baseline traffic between nodes, among other things.

      "4. You can "isolate" nodes and then track all their traffic"
      This depends on the network design and on the threat model. If the network follows a darknet topology (as is the case for Freenet in "darknet mode"), it becomes hard to bootstrap yourself to the network and start harvesting peers. It may even be impossible to connect to a certain node without prior approval, so it becomes hard to trace the origin of specific data insertions. If you assume a über-attacker who can still see the (encrypted) traffic between nodes, it's still difficult to track specific data insertions in the network if the baseline traffic is high.

      Also, you forgot about "intersection attacks". These are also partially thwarted by networks who don't keep a global table of nodes (like Freenet in "opennet mode") and severely thwarted by darknet topologies.

    15. Re:Time to get encryption working by thijsh · · Score: 1

      I always hear this argument, but it never stopped SSH or SFTP. You simply store the key as 'trusted' the first time and you have a fair protection against MITM attacks from then on. And considering the fact that the unencrypted variants (telnet, FTP, and HTTP just the same) are all vulnerable to MITM attacks as well as password interception etc. it's no valid reason not to use encryption with SSC. It's several factors more secure.

    16. Re:Time to get encryption working by tepples · · Score: 1

      The fact that your ISP can simply drop encrypted bits?

      How can an ISP reliably distinguish encrypted bits from merely compressed bits?

    17. Re:Time to get encryption working by tepples · · Score: 1

      If the Internet was already useful when everyone only had 56k, an anonymous network at 56k is not completely useless.

      In the late 1990s when v.90 was popular, the web was text with a few still graphics. New applications have sprung up since then that assume a faster connection, such as SWF sites and YouTube.

      adding chaff

      Is this practical even with the 5 GB per month cap typical of satellite or cellular Internet? Or is it suitable only for cable and DSL?

      If the network follows a darknet topology (as is the case for Freenet in "darknet mode"), it becomes hard to bootstrap yourself to the network and start harvesting peers.

      It also becomes hard to bootstrap yourself to the network if you have a legitimate use but don't have any face-to-face friends who use the network.

    18. Re:Time to get encryption working by tepples · · Score: 1

      I always hear this argument, but it never stopped SSH or SFTP.

      In my experience, SSH and SFTP are most often used between a customer and leased server space such as shared web hosting, a virtual dedicated server, or a dedicated server. The key fingerprint is supposed to be verified with either a telephone call or an HTTPS session using a CA certificate, possibly the same certificate used to take the customer's payment information when the customer set up the lease.

    19. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Is this practical even with the 5 GB per month cap typical of satellite or cellular Internet? Or is it suitable only for cable and DSL?".
      Obviously, any of these type of p2p applications will not work very well on bandwidth-constrained situations for the hosting of stable nodes. I see no problem (in the case of Freenet/datastore-type solutions) in using a satellite or cellular Internet access to connect to the network, insert/request the data you want/need and quickly disconnect. This makes you more open to correlation/intersection attacks, but saves you bandwidth and is better than no anonymity by far.

      "It also becomes hard to bootstrap yourself to the network if you have a legitimate use but don't have any face-to-face friends who use the network."
      Yep. It's not a bug, it's a (safety) feature ;) In the case of Freenet, they solved the issue by providing both a "opennet" and a "darknet" mode (or you can use both, if you want). Using "opennet" is not as safe as "darknet" mode for most threat models, but it still seems to provide pretty good plausible deniability.

    20. Re:Time to get encryption working by Nursie · · Score: 1

      Look, if you care *that much* about having control of your own signing infrastructure then set up your own CA (something that is trivially easy), sign your own sites and include the CA public cert in you browser. Then make sure that everyone else using your site gets th CA public cert in a secure, preferably offline fashion.

      You don't *have* to pay money to a commercial CA, and you may not want to because you don't trust them, but if you care at all about security you need to replace it with something.

    21. Re:Time to get encryption working by Kjella · · Score: 1

      True, but you can get speeds above what you would get from 56k dialup modems on current designs [which] is not completely useless.

      Absolutely, but if you look at what is popular in P2P it's large media files. Assuming the goal is to make something a large part of the population would use, it's not exactly a winner.

      In the case of Freenet [...] due to the fact that data insertion/retrieval is asynchronous, timing/correlation attacks are not trivial even if you control several nodes.

      That one was mostly aimed at TOR, where you have interactive services. For Freenet statistical attacks are more likely, but you also lost pretty much all interactivity. It's all static data, static "freesites" and message groups as slow as Usenet on sleep drugs. That kills the interest for things you would run over a 56k modem.

      Depends on your threat model, but even assuming a powerful attacker which can see all data flowing between ALL nodes (a very strong assumption), garlic routing, adding chaff and increasing latencies can help.

      Depends on network, with TOR you can do pattern attacks (send bursts of data in a pattern, if each node fowards instantly you can recognize it with a delay) and in Freenet if you insert/download a big file will lead to hundreds or thousands of pieces being inserted/requested and you can try following it "upstream" to see where it gets thicker. There are many tricks.

      This depends on the network design and on the threat model. If the network follows a darknet topology (as is the case for Freenet in "darknet mode")

      Darknets are a two-edged sword. By being a darknet peer, you claim to trust that person which brings forth all sorts of suspicion or guilt by association. Allowing someone you don't know to be a darknet peer will reveal your IP to them. Just that you're trying to build a darknet will raise eyebrows, it's not something that will catch on.

      Also, you forgot about "intersection attacks".

      Not really, I just consider them a variation of latency attacks. Nodes come and go all the time, it's pretty weak evidence. It's actually much stronger evidence if you can show that each time you bombard this node with traffic, this hidden service gets very slow and if you stop bombarding, it returns to normal speed.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    22. Re:Time to get encryption working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Absolutely, but if you look at what is popular in P2P it's large media files. Assuming the goal is to make something a large part of the population would use, it's not exactly a winner."
      Agreed. On the other hand, the only people who have the power to make a large part of the population use such systems is probably RIAA/MPAA and other copyrightionists, if they continue pushing draconian laws. Also, at least on I2P, torrent/ed2k use (even for large files) is encouraged, so...

      "That one was mostly aimed at TOR, where you have interactive services. For Freenet statistical attacks are more likely, but you also lost pretty much all interactivity. It's all static data, static "freesites" and message groups as slow as Usenet on sleep drugs. That kills the interest for things you would run over a 56k modem."
      Yep. I would agree Tor (and probably I2P) are somewhat open to timing attacks (due to their low-latency goal). On the other hand, the attack you describe only works for _very powerful_ threat models which can see all data flowing between every node. If I'm using such networks for tame things (like copyright infringment), my threat model is probably MediaSentry-type of entities, not the CIA/FBI/KGB. Also, regarding Freenet, there is no reason why you can't have dynamic applications running on top of the "static datastore"... I mean, Freenet has a collaborative wiki... doesn't that count as dynamic? But, yes... in general, there is a tradeoff between latency and anonymity. Use Freenet if anonymity is paramount (for example, if you're trading child porn) and use I2P/Tor if latency/throughput is more important (for example, if you're just infringing copyrights and your threat model is less powerful).

      "Depends on network, with TOR you can do pattern attacks (send bursts of data in a pattern, if each node fowards instantly you can recognize it with a delay) and in Freenet if you insert/download a big file will lead to hundreds or thousands of pieces being inserted/requested and you can try following it "upstream" to see where it gets thicker. There are many tricks."
      Yep. Low-latency networks are especially vulnerable to timing attacks (assuming low baseline traffic). What you describe for Freenet insertions/requests, once again, assumes someone who can see all datalinks and already knowns the data being inserted/requested. Yes, there are many tricks, but most of them give you little more than "a probabilistic hint" that would not be admissible in court (i.e. prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that the data was inserted by me), although it could probably be enough to scare pedophiles off Freenet. Since there is plenty of child porn left on Freenet and such networks, I would say those tricks you mention are probably hard/impossible to implement in real life.

      "Darknets are a two-edged sword. By being a darknet peer, you claim to trust that person which brings forth all sorts of suspicion or guilt by association. Allowing someone you don't know to be a darknet peer will reveal your IP to them. Just that you're trying to build a darknet will raise eyebrows, it's not something that will catch on."
      I agree, and that's why I advocate a hybrid darknet/opennet system. A pure darknet system has the problem that it leaks information about the underlying social network. Nodes, therefore should connect to both trusted and untrusted nodes to introduce some plausible deniability. Also, I also thought copyright infringment would never be prevalent in the mainstream population and yet, nowadays, even my MOTHER uses torrents and rapidshare and whatnot. The way I see it, if it becomes necessary, it will catch on.

      "Not really, I just consider them a variation of latency attacks. Nodes come and go all the time, it's pretty weak evidence. It's actually much stronger evidence if you can show that each time you bombard this node with traffic, this hidden service gets very slow and if you stop bombarding, it returns to normal speed."
      That depends on the network design, but yes, in general, low latency networks are always somewhat vulnerable to this. On the other hand, datastore-type of networks (like Freenet) make it much more hard to trace the origin of a data insertion/request (especially if the data size is small compared to the baseline traffic).

    23. Re:Time to get encryption working by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Encrypted is not really complicated, use https sites and turn encryption on in your torrent client.

      I think you mean "protocol encryption" for torrents.
      When you enable protocol encryption for torrents, all you're doing is obfuscating the traffic in an attempt to keep your ISP from throttling you (on the basis of it being a torrent).

      This does NOTHING to encrypt the actual data sent, so anyone doing a MITM attack can see what you're downloading.

      If total encryption were implemented, it would do NOTHING to stop a copyright holder from hopping on the same torrent and seeing everyone in the swarm.

      Private trackers, dark nets, and whatever other shitty ideas you can come up with will all fail. If you have 2 people who trust each other, they'll only ever be able to share what one of them already has. If you allow these two trusting users to invite others in to increase the amount of shit you can get, you've thrown out your entire trust model, and your "private" network must be assumed to be compromised.

    24. Re:Time to get encryption working by sexconker · · Score: 1

      BME Pain Olympics is fake, by the way.

  5. And of course... by Haedrian · · Score: 3, Funny

    Since this effects all of us in a huge way, there will be some sort of referendum which will see what the PEOPLE want and not just the corporation-bribed governments.

    Experts say it'll happen on the 30th of Feburary at Half Past Never.

    1. Re:And of course... by v1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not that it's surprising that this happens, but it is a bit surprising that our "diplomats" are allowed to sign agreements that our own court system has already determined to be illegal. Though in this instance it appears they're not just signing off on it, but pushing for it.

      Should try them for treason when they get back stateside ;)

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    2. Re:And of course... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      They can sign whatever they like. Has absolutely no legal barring. Treaties only enter into force once ratified by the Senate.

    3. Re:And of course... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since this effects all of us in a huge way, there will be some sort of referendum which will see what the PEOPLE want and not just the corporation-bribed governments.

      Experts say it'll happen on the 30th of Feburary at Half Past Never.

      check your "experts" again - that date doesn't exist

    4. Re:And of course... by shentino · · Score: 1

      The same Senate whose campaign contributions come from the very same companies that are pushing for ACTA in the first place?

    5. Re:And of course... by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Once we've got a treaty, there is huge pressure to enact it into law.

      And treaties of this type aren't simply ratified, laws must be written to bring the country into compliance. That's where the pressure lies - we've got the treaty, now we have to change our laws to match.

      Current copyright law is a perfect example of how this process works - look up the Berne Convention.

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    6. Re:And of course... by the_womble · · Score: 1

      Thats WHY they are pushing for it. Its a way to present the courts and the people with a fait accompli.

      The UK uses the EU the same way.

    7. Re:And of course... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      DId you see that fucking bird that just wooshed over your head?

  6. terrible effects for software patents by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 4, Informative

    ACTA has many bad parts, such as entrenching DRM and the deadly effects of pharmaceutical patents, but it also has terrible effects for software patents:

    http://en.swpat.org/wiki/ACTA_and_software_patents

    http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Criminalising_patent_infringement_is_draconian

    1. Re:terrible effects for software patents by jambarama · · Score: 3, Informative

      Those aren't the only bad parts of ACTA. Here are some more odious provisions, in my opinion:

      * ACTA would impose the DMCA's "no circumventing DRM" clause everywhere
      * ACTA imposes 3rd party liability for infringement everywhere (it already exists in the US & much of Europe)
      * ACTA creates ISP safe harbors (plus notice & takedown), but raises the bar for qualification, e.g. ISPs must have some plan to curtail repeat infringement by subscribers
      * ACTA offers statutory damages to copyright holder, as well as actual damages, and as Jammie Thomas can tell you, that wipes out any relevance to damage
      * ACTA targets transferring pharmaceuticals across the border, which is mostly designed to get those going from Canada to the US
      * ACTA requires criminal penalties for "willful" infringers, and their aiders/abettors, which is looser than the current US standard
      * The forfeiture provision for large scale infringers is vague enough to possibly be a problem
      * ACTA has broad

      China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, New Zealand, & Japan really don't like it for a lot of reasons. To a some extent, the developing world doesn't like it because it would cost policing resources enforcing copyright/trademark when the resources are needed for more important activities, like stopping crimes. The US & Western Europe are the largest proponents.

  7. YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You voted for this crap (slashdot is overwhelmingly democrat). It started with Clinton and DMCA and now you have OBAMA ("transparent", "change you can believe in") doing this crap (and behind closed doors to boot). Bend over and say again how much you love getting fucked by your boys.

    There is ZERO push back against this. None. No press. No protests. No letter writing. Zero. It will become law unless you take your head out of the sand and say something anywhere but slashdot.

    1. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by magamiako1 · · Score: 1

      Actually, for the record, after reading the text and noting on Slashdot I promptly sent a note to both of my state Senators and my House Representative expressing my disliking of said measure.

      Not to get too political here, but those of us in the know knew that this sort of thing was going to come up when we voted for Obama since we were well aware of Biden's industry-friendly attitude. Unfortunately, it was this or some of the worst, laughable "politicians" you could ever consider to be put into a Presidential Office. Either way, I'm still glad that the alternative did not make it into office.

    2. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why do you blame Democrats for the DMCA? The bill was introduced into the House by a Republican, it faced pretty much zero Republican opposition in the House and had unanimous support in the Senate. Oh and let's not forget that the current head of the RIAA is a former Republican staffer and GOP lobbyist. So exactly why is it the Democrats fault despite the fact that this bill was introduced and had basically universal support from the Republicans in Congress?

    3. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by russotto · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not to get too political here, but those of us in the know knew that this sort of thing was going to come up when we voted for Obama since we were well aware of Biden's industry-friendly attitude. Unfortunately, it was this or some of the worst, laughable "politicians" you could ever consider to be put into a Presidential Office. Either way, I'm still glad that the alternative did not make it into office.

      Particularly since the alternative would have done exactly the same thing.

    4. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because ALL politicians are dirtbags. Republican fault? Yes. Democrat fault? Yes. Remember, Clinton signed DMCA into law. Remember his party? Yes, the dirtbag one.

    5. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Partisians don't care about progress, just blaming the other side.

    6. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fuck Democrats. Fuck Republicans. Libertarian here.

    7. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by swilver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I find this so funny... letting the people just blame one of the two parties in America and bickering about it amongst yourselves seems to me to be the ultimate weapon politicians devised to keep you under their rule.

    8. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      There were several alternatives that would not have, we just chose to completely ignore them.

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    9. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Why do you blame Democrats for the DMCA?
      Maybe because they control the House, Senate and the Presidency?

      Do you think for one second, if this was under Bush the title would have been "Bush Admin caves on ISPs..."

      When Bush was in office the liberals screamed about everything blaming it on Bush and the Repubs...
      Now the Dems control House, Senate and Presidency and are doing the exact same things... they are strangely quiet...

      This is how tyranny advances.

      Oh, and anyone who dares to point this out is modified flame bait.

    10. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe because Democrats are busy blaming Republicans for not legislation pass when they control the house, the senate and the executive branch? If you're going to stand in protest against this kind of rhetoric you must also take a stand against the Democrats doing this kind of thing or you're nothing but a stinking hypocrite with a pair of blinders on.

    11. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by tepples · · Score: 1

      Why do you blame Democrats for the DMCA?

      Maybe because they control the House, Senate and the Presidency?

      When the DMCA was enacted, Republicans controlled the House and the Senate.

    12. Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

      I blame both parties for the DMCA. I just find it amusing that people try to blame only the Democrats for the DMCA when it was a Republican-sponsored bill and had basically unanimous Republican support.

  8. Re:You can't have it both ways. by haploc · · Score: 1

    If America can't get control of information soon, we are royally screwed.

    Don't bet all your eggs in the same basket.

  9. Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This has to be drilled into everybody's heads.

    Copyrights and patents must be abolished, they are part of the death of economies, just like governments regulations, taxes, subsidies, wars, corporate involvement, corruption, stimulus borrowing/printing/spending and bailouts.

    All of the above things are killing the economies, these things are making industrialized world uncompetitive and jobs are leaving and no amount of cash can be spent to make the industrialized world competitive again ever because the reason cannot be simply removed by spending.

    The reason of the underlying structural breakage of economy is lack of useful production/manufacturing jobs, whose loss has resulted from lack of competitiveness. Competition is the only correct solution to this problem, and copyrights, patents, regulations, wage laws, taxes, subsidies, bailouts, stimulus, wars, corporate corruption are all tied to one main entity: government.

    Government is the ultimate force with the power to compel people to do what they do not want to do, and it does so because it craves power, through people who join the government because they crave power, and for them gov't is the ultimate way to get power and money by sharing with corporate friends.

    Government involvement in economy must be removed completely and that is the only way to remove incentives to corrupt the government, spending all the money in the world on buying the gov't should NOT buy you a free ride and destruction and structural removal of any competition.

    This comment is the actual answer to the question: what the fuck happened to the economy?

    1. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by elucido · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This has to be drilled into everybody's heads.

      Copyrights and patents must be abolished, they are part of the death of economies, just like governments regulations, taxes, subsidies, wars, corporate involvement, corruption, stimulus borrowing/printing/spending and bailouts.

      All of the above things are killing the economies, these things are making industrialized world uncompetitive and jobs are leaving and no amount of cash can be spent to make the industrialized world competitive again ever because the reason cannot be simply removed by spending.

      The reason of the underlying structural breakage of economy is lack of useful production/manufacturing jobs, whose loss has resulted from lack of competitiveness. Competition is the only correct solution to this problem, and copyrights, patents, regulations, wage laws, taxes, subsidies, bailouts, stimulus, wars, corporate corruption are all tied to one main entity: government.

      Government is the ultimate force with the power to compel people to do what they do not want to do, and it does so because it craves power, through people who join the government because they crave power, and for them gov't is the ultimate way to get power and money by sharing with corporate friends.

      Government involvement in economy must be removed completely and that is the only way to remove incentives to corrupt the government, spending all the money in the world on buying the gov't should NOT buy you a free ride and destruction and structural removal of any competition.

      This comment is the actual answer to the question: what the fuck happened to the economy?

      That is unrealistic. Copyright and patents should not be abolished. They just shouldn't last forever. They should last X amount of years that society agrees upon, not an arbitrary number decided by the copyright holders themselves but a number of years decided by that individual culture or that society.

    2. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it's called a crisis. In a crisis situation rules change, if they don't then that 'unrealistic' situation will actually meet reality, and reality will win, and there will be no economy left to speak of, while the rest of the world would just completely ignore any position a country, whose economy fell apart takes, and they'd be correct not to care. Losers do not tell winners what to do.

    3. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by sexybomber · · Score: 1

      Losers do not tell winners what to do.

      No, they just whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

    4. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Jafafa+Hots · · Score: 1

      Yes! We must get government out of the economy! Only THEN can we return to the glory days of the 1890s when every child could find a steady job!

      --
      This space available.
    5. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nice rant but totally unrealistic. Economies can't grow without limits as the raw materials are not boundless.

      Manufacturing jobs will always be eliminated over time as automation replaces people. The US right now has the largest manufacturing output of any nation in history, and it's doing it with only 8% of its population. The US output is larger than China, India and Brazil combined.

      White collar jobs are headed the same way as software replaces people.

      So what is left? Simply make do public sector jobs funded by taxation on productive work. There isn't any other possible outcome.

    6. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      Your private union is your private matter. Having gov't imposed regulations simply undermines economy and kills competition, whatever the competition is. You are faced with reality: other economies are much more competitive and the reasons have been listed. It is really your choice.

      The government is broke, USA cannot repay gov't debt, any single % point up in the t-bills (which are all short term) would result in 134billion dollars more of interest. The debt will NOT be repaid, it will be printed, so the dollar will be destroyed.

      The GDP means nothing, it's a fake number, especially after all the bailouts and stimulus spending, the real number to look at is the trade imbalance, and that is where the information can be obtained about the health of economy and the picture is crystal clear.

    7. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by ivucica · · Score: 1

      Let's remember what sort of thing happens when corporations are allowed to "compete" freely.

      Best regards,
      - a citizen of a country "in transition"

    8. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      The US output can only be measured in real terms by the trade balance numbers, GDP is meaningless, the way it's counted is meaningless and it became more meaningless with bailouts and stimulus spending and printing.

      Manufacturing jobs are automated, but while they are eliminated in the USA (the latest job growth in private sector of about 60K jobs was all in service sector, which does not help the trade imbalance at all), in China, Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of Asia these jobs are growing.

      The reasons of-course lay in unions but importantly wage laws, because once you compete with a wage law, you are not only competing with other people in your field, you are competing with capital. There is a reason people are no longer answering phones or checking your oil at a gas pump or bagging your groceries and carrying them to your car.

      Raw materials are not the problem, at least not for the next few thousands of years, there is Canada and Russia and Africa and probably the Arctic, those have more materials than we can use for now.

      The ultimate answer to your question is not government job for everybody. If ALL JOBS are automated WHY do you need to work? What, do you love your job so that you'd rather work than spend time on a beach?

      Working is not the goal (for most people anyway,) so paying you a gov't salary to dig a ditch and fill it back in (as Krugman proposed on CNBC radio just a week ago) is retarded.

      Using money from productive work to fund gov't jobs is retarded just as well. Your last statement is crazy. That would mean that we have tapped out all possibilities for further expansion of human ideas and that is unlikely. If that were to happen you'd see draconian laws implemented to reduce population to something extremely controlled, and that is not going to happen, so instead people would continue expanding and work would have to continue being productive for the most of population on the planet.

      Gov't is less than 10% of all population, 90% of population is funding that monster. Growing that to much bigger number is not sustainable and very dangerous for economy in its totality, less you want to see some extreme wars to wipe out entire countries.

    9. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Jafafa+Hots · · Score: 1

      Having gov't imposed regulations simply undermines economy and kills competition, whatever the competition is.

      If there are indeed an infinite number of alternate universes in which every possible thing has happened, there may actually be one in which this statement is NOT painfully and obviously untrue to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history, and indeed in which someone uttering it such as yourself has NOT entertainingly exposed himself as being a fucking moron.

      --
      This space available.
    10. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by siride · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Competition can't solve pollution. Only regulations can. Competition had its chance and still has its chance and companies are STILL polluting.

    11. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      My friend. You are comparing Enron to gov't today, realize that

      1. Enron never was in a free market of any kind at all, you are talking about ENERGY sector! Billions, tens of billions of gov't subsidies and regulations and various laws and you must be crazy to believe this has anything to do with free market.

      2. Same for Comcast. AT&T by the way, was given a priority by gov't to own a nationalized phone cable system, but forget AT&T. Gov't is OWNED by these industries: energy, military, banking, insurance, food, telecommunications, there is no free market there, never was, and by looks of it economy will be destroyed and there will be no free market there ever until the gov't dies off as a species (we arent' that lucky)

      3. Any disaster that you can point at has a direct correlation to destruction of Freedoms that people must be able to enjoy under Constitution (well, in USA), the gov't is the first entity not to care about private property, gov't doesn't care how it treats property, all property needs to be privatized so that there is always a meaningful owner, who'll stand in the way of others destroying it.

      4. Gov't is a pyramid scheme much much much bigger than Enron and Madoff and all other schemes COMBINED.

      Fed is printing money, they are printing t-bills, they are setting interest rates, they are a gigantic monopoly on monetary policy.

      So when Enron came up with fake income numbers based on future income, what do you think gov't is doing when it's printing t-bills? :))))) Gov't IS ENRON, it IS Berney Madoff.

      They are telling you: we are going to have this earnings, look, buy our t-bills, we'll pay you back with interest, when in fact what it does it moves its debt from one credit card to another at this point near every 6 months.

      Learn, learn, learn, that's the only way out of ignorance.

    12. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      You are just misunderstanding the problem.

      The gov't owned property is nobody's property, so it can be polluted.

      Gov't must NOT OWN PROPERTY, all property (ocean, land, air, radio spectrum, whatever) and assets, must be in private hands, and then any pollution problem would be solved between owner of the land anybody who'd attempt to destroy that property.

      BP, as an example, got permission to drill in the Gulf, in fact over 30K drilling happened there, near 3000 oil drilling/producing rigs are there right now. Did anybody really decide to give them this right but your gov't? Your gov't is giving them the right to drill, it then removes the liability caps.

      You think your gov't WILL protect your natural resources and your common land and air and water? NO.

      Only an OWNER does that. As an owner do you come home and take huge DUMP in the middle of your kitchen? What if a guest came and did that, would you make sure he cleans up and maybe pays you some damages?

      That is the ultimate problem, people have been brainwashed completely into this nonsense.

    13. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      I see, so saying that I am a 'fucking moron' clearly puts a historic perspective on my statement and makes it 'obviously untrue'. You have solved the mystery, good for you.

    14. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      since my comments always go through a cycle of being moderated up and then down after a while (well, there are people who wait until nobody is reading further and then they moderate down) I am actually thanking you for quoting my comment completely before answering it and your comment will stay at above 4, so at least people will see what the thread is about.

    15. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by siride · · Score: 1

      Well, companies are polluting privately owned property too. I don't even know why you went on this government owned property business because it's just simply not true and is irrelevant.

      See, the problem you are having is that there is an imbalance in power between a company and all the people affected by it, who may not even know they are being affected. Sure, a single owner might be able to do something, or they might not. I mean, is a single owner going to be able to enforce that he doesn't want pollution coming into his property? How? Is he going to stand around all day waiting for the company to pollute and then shoot them? What if they pollute on someone else's property and it runs off into his? Only collective will can force a company to stop polluting everywhere for everyone's benefit. And that collective will is called, you guessed it, government.

    16. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I disagree. Few people and companies would invest the money and time to make new things if they knew that the moment they did so, their competitors would buy one example of the product, copy it, and sell it without having any of the substantial costs involved in research and development. I'm not saying that companies that do invest in research in development *deserve* some special monopoly as if it was some kind of innate right -- it clearly isn't. I'm saying that it is to society's benefit if we grant a temporary (time-limited), limited (not all rights) monopoly as a reward for making something new rather than recycling the same old crap. It will stimulate research and development, creative new works, reward companies and people that are innovative, and so on -- i.e. exactly what the U.S. constitution and other countries claim as the benefit of having copyright, patent, and related "intellectual property" laws.

      What's actually needed is some (excuse my language) fucking balance -- as in, no, when you make something it does not grant you some god-given, forever-active right to squeeze any and all money out of the information territory you've staked out, and it doesn't grant you the right to prevent ALL uses of that idea except the ones you allow, or to put locks and fences around it. We need to roll back the ever-extending length of copyright terms, strongly defend fair use rights, shorten patent terms, limit the use of DRM, and remind "intellectual property" owners that what they have is NOT "property". It's a public grant. It's an idea that you get a temporary, limited-rights monopoly for, and that's it. Once it's over it's time to pay for having that right by turning it over to the public that granted the monopoly in the first place, and stop grumbling about it as if we've "stolen" your land. And stop trying to buy politicians into making it last forever. You're paying off a debt to the public that was inherent in granting you the limited "rights" in the first place, so suck it up and deal with it: GO MAKE SOMETHING NEW if you want more money.

      The one way I agree with you is for software patents: they're stupid, because it's patenting math. I have no problem with abolishing those, or making the patent term amazingly short (like 2 to 5 years).

      We need responsible, representative government that interacts with the people. The government is us. If you seriously think that it would be possible to manage commercial corruption such as securities fraud without government then you haven't been paying attention to the fiasco of the last few years, which was rooted primarily in the premise that the financial industry, in their own interests, would never-ever start doing things that would undermine the whole system, thus it was okay to regulate them less and let the children manage the financial playground on their own. Guess what? They certainly will undercut the whole system if it lets them make millions of dollars this year and retire the next, before the economic catastrophe happens.

      Want a concrete example that more government regulation could have prevented that financial fiasco? Look at the banks in Canada. Canada's economy is nothing special and is strongly tied to the USA's. Yet not a single bank failed, and the degree of government support of the banks was minimal. Why? Banking regulation, tougher rules for house mortgages and other lending, and so on. That's the sum total of what it took to avoid nearly collapsing the economy even when living right beside the economy (USA) that arguably took the worst of it. It's not magic: sensible government regulations. And if you think the Canadian government is somehow more efficient and less bureaucratic than the United States -- no way. It's probably sloppier and more wasteful. It's the regulations that mattered, and the encoded sense that, no, we can't trust corporations to mind their own store, so if you want to do business in Canada, deal with it or get out.

      If you want a robust syst

    17. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      You can pollute in your kitchen all you want, but if the pollutions spreads from your kitchen to a kitchen of a guy below you (say it's an apartment building) and you are leaking water and throwing sewage at him, he now has a reason to take you to court and it's between two property owners.

      This problem you have, is that you want to stop a company from polluting on their property, I don't know why, it's their property. The real question is this: if your property is adjacent to his and you get the pollution spreading onto your territory, whether by ground, water or air, you now have the right to take that other owner to court.

      That's the only reason to have a gov't:

      1. Minimum military to protect against invasion.
      2. Court system, justice system to allow people to resolve contract issues, property issues, things like that.
      3. Prisons/cops.

      Gov't has a role to play, people need a justice system, and a gov't that's not involved in economy and only has 3 roles can be kept in check and controlled to do those 3 jobs right. If you can't have a gov't doing 3 jobs right, what chance do you have in hell insuring it does 3 million jobs right?

    18. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not sure what you're talking about.

      The companies listed in your links have all benefited greatly from government handouts and favorable regulations (to lock out competitors).

      You can't rail against the "free market" then provide examples which have received special government attention. ... well you can, but you'll look like an idiot.

    19. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 0, Troll

      didn't read, please log in and post under a nick, not as AC, it's stupid to try and carry conversations with ACs as there are too many of them.

    20. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by siride · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So I take the company to court and...what are they going to tell him? The only thing they can tell him is not to pollute on my property. Easy enough for them to deal with. They'll still be polluting on other people's property. They'll probably be polluting the water supply to. Well, I don't own the water supply, the water company does. And if the water company doesn't care, then I just have to deal with it. Maybe it pollutes the food supply. I don't own the food supply, so I can't do anything about that either. I just have to hope there are alternative water and food supplies that aren't polluted. Of course, you'd probably tell me that I need to sue the food and water companies for not providing pollution-free food and water. So now they need to sue the polluting company. And we have to wait for all this to work out. And it only solves the issue once. Next time they pollute, we have to go through the rigamarole all over again. I'm now spending all my time suing people who try to pollute instead of doing something useful.

      Or, we could just have government regulations and have a set of people who have the legal authority to monitor pollution and force those who pollute to stop. Now I don't have to spend all day suing people and tracing where the pollution came from to sue the right people. It just gets done. It also helps all those other people who otherwise would have to individually sue the polluters or their food and water supply companies. It's simply more efficient and it actually solves the problem from here on out. Or at least it's closer to a solution. Companies will still try to pollute, but instead of waiting for the pollution to become a problem, it can be nipped in the bud with inspections and monitoring that are legally forced to be on their property, not yours. See, by the time the pollution is on your property, it's too late. The damage has been done. It's an entirely reactive instead of proactive process.

      It's all fun and good to make a microkernel government and it's really easy to point out problems with the existing government structures. But the microkernel government doesn't work because it distributes work that should be done by a common public trust (the government) and tries to place entities that don't actually have equal power and resources into a situation where they are considered to be of equal power and resources. It's me versus a company now, instead of the public versus a company. And the former is a much tougher battle to fight.

      What we out to do, instead of stripping the government of everything that makes it useful, is to find ways to keep private interests from infecting the government and let it go back to being a public good. That's really what the problem is. If injecting some libertarian principles in the mix would help, I'm all for it. But let's not kid ourselves and think that the government-as-contract-enforcer is actually a workable system in anything approaching the real world.

    21. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      Copyrights and patents must be abolished, they are part of the death of economies, just like governments regulations, taxes, subsidies, wars, corporate involvement, corruption, stimulus borrowing/printing/spending and bailouts.

      LOLFR, if I didn't know about your posting history, I would've assumed you were just trolling for libertarians. I can only assume your brain has been addled by the lead in your toys and the chemicals in your toothpaste that proper government regulation and inspection would have prevented.

    22. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by ivucica · · Score: 1

      Obviously I gave wrong examples; perhaps I can be forgiven since this is not a part of day-to-day politics in my country. But despite the horrors US government is obviously inflicting upon its citizens (primarily I mean using tax money to pay for unnecessary wars, but you list other fine examples), I look at the way people behave toward each other in day-to-day life. Homo homini lupus..

      Complete deregulation would be horrible. Demonization of all regulation is wrong. People abuse. Companies abuse.

      Limited subsidies are not evil -- some sort of governing is necessary in human life. Limited regulation is needed to prevent stuff like poisonous plastics used in Chinese toys. Your post is attacking all regulation, all taxes, all government, but anarchy isn't a solution. Western societies are not sufficiently evolved and may never be.

      (On the other hand, I agree with your views on monetary politics today being based upon a massive fraud. Borrowing is never the way out, it's just a way to dig yourself deeper. Which is why I will for as long as I can avoid getting any kind of bank loan and encourage others to see that they benefit noone in the long term by getting loans.)

    23. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by ivucica · · Score: 1

      I tried pointing out that people are assholes, and would be even bigger assholes if we completely abolished any sort of regulation (which seems to be OP's desire). But you're right, not only do I look like an idiot, I probably am (and I take no offense in that); it is embarrassing though that I tried providing an example out of a set of things I am not completely familiar with. Mea culpa.

    24. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes. Countries that have economies, economies that actually make stuff and sell it have money. Making up a bunch of bull shit rules about basically nothing is really, just nothing. There is really only 1 country that cares about all this. I understand that that countries economy is otherwise, tanking. Do real people benefit from these rules? No. Some large corporation benefits. What about people working for them? There are only 50 people working for them, and the bosses are roughly half of those people, and they take 95%. Shareholders (mostly other corporations) also own stakes. They benefit too. All of these rules basically benefit about 2000 people worldwide. There are 7 billion people on the planet, and they are being dictated to by 2000. Are they really 3500000 times as important as you? They have 3500000 times as much money as you, but their 'specialness' is questionable. The only reason they have 3500000 times as much money as you is because they have had the rules in their favor for such a long time. It has to end. Slashdot pact: Any government adopting this must *MUST* fall.

    25. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Requiem18th · · Score: 1

      Although I think that we need some people pushing hard for copyright abolition for balance.

      --
      But... the future refused to change.
    26. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      That's just silly, the parent comment was not a troll, it makes sense. Arguing with ACs is silly because there are armies of them and you don't know who's who.

    27. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      So I take the company to court and...what are they going to tell him? The only thing they can tell him is not to pollute on my property. Easy enough for them to deal with. They'll still be polluting on other people's property. They'll probably be polluting the water supply to.

      - a working justice system, which I did not bother describing, would have more authority than 'just telling'.

      You are caught with some trivial substances on you in most countries today, you can go to jail, and you didn't even hurt anybody. Why do I have to come up with an entire working justice system to make a point?

      If your water supply is polluted you take it up with whoever provides you with your water, and they have to take it up with whoever pollutes it, why is that difficult to see? You probably can program some software, maybe something more than even trivial, is what I am proposing beyond logic?

      As to polluters that cause entire communities to suffer, that where Action Class Lawsuits come into play. You sue the MOFO who fucked up the water collectively through the Justice dep't, and if he doesn't fix it immediately he gets shot down, that's what cops and prisons are for, again, same question as before applies...

      Now I don't have to spend all day suing people and tracing where the pollution came from to sue the right people. It just gets done.

      - really? Does it 'get done'? How many oil rigs have spilled over the decades, what is getting done? The millions of barrels of oil are out there, the damage IS done, your point is INVALID.

      The gov't DOES NOT CARE about your public common property! You do not see it? You really really really do not see it? It doesn't care! If it cared, there would be no liability caps, there would be real inspections, etc. But gov't cannot and will not inspect things, because it is unprofitable for politicians to do the work that you THINK they must do, they don't think so, it's NOT what they think of their work, they don't care, it's NOT THEIR PROPERTY!

      I was born in the USSR, the property that does not belong to you, but belongs to gov't is nobodies property, people knew it and they destroyed and stole and didn't want to work and cheated, etc. It's just common sense, if you are NOT the owner you don't care, and nobody in gov't is the owner.

      It's the same as for large gov't created monopolies, the CEOs are NOT owners, they don't care about anything but their own pockets, so they make sure to line their pockets and they leave mess and destruction behind. HP Fiorina is a good example when compared to the original Hewlett and Packard who started the company. Who CARED MORE? Hewlett and Packard or Fiorina?

      It's the same exact precise principle at work, until you have an actual OWNER you won't see any changes at all.

      The only single working way to fix the problem is to get all powers of gov't away from gov't except for the bare minimum I have described, which is then controlled by the people closely, and it is much easier to control jobs of 3 departments than of 30000000 departments.

      The point is exactly

    28. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by phantomfive · · Score: 0

      So what is left? Simply make do public sector jobs funded by taxation on productive work. There isn't any other possible outcome.

      Really? That's the limit of your creativity and economic knowledge? What will happen is people will find other ways to make money. We are entering the era where flexibility is king, if you can learn new skills, develop new abilities and adjust to changing times, then you will win, but if you try to do the same thing over and over, you will lose.

      And that is what's happening. People are finding other things to do, a lot of it is providing services, a lot of it is diversification into niche production. There's a store nearby here that makes bouquets out of fruit. There's not a huge market for that, but enough. If you can come up with something novel and interesting, you can make money.

      --
      Qxe4
    29. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by shentino · · Score: 1

      And you can bet that the rules won't change back once the crisis is over.

      Hitler used an economic crisis to jump start the police state that was Nazi Germany.

      And just to avoid an exclusive godwin, this is also how Senator Palpatine turned into Darth Sidious.

      Taking advantage of a crisis to usurp power is an old trick.

    30. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by shentino · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's because nobody has to pay for environmental damage unless they are forced to.

      Tragedy of the commons.

      Look up "externalities".

      Incidentally, the Ruhr region of Germany solves this by making polluters pay for the privilege.

    31. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      My point stands, learn.

      Complete deregulation would be horrible. Demonization of all regulation is wrong. People abuse. Companies abuse.

      - USA has this little document, it really only is a few pages, it's called The Constitution. The Constitution says that people have all rights because they have them always, not because somebody grants the people these rights, this is different from say, Russia, where Constitution grants rights. In the USA Constitution lists what Gov't can and cannot do, that's the main purpose, because Constitution is a Federal paper, which then has to be ratified by separate States. If a State does not agree with the Constitution it doesn't ratify it, the State doesn't have to participate in the Union, though it's difficult practically, but from point of view of the law it is correct.

      Understand that all regulations by Federal government is allowed to it by States only based on most likely a single clause: commerce clause. This clause has been abused to basically go around the Constitution for the past 200 years too many times and at this point the gov't is the actual source of the problem, not a source of any solutions specifically because it has completely abandoned the Constitutional principles.

      The USA is a unique society, well, it WAS before, now Switzerland looks more like what USA tried to be than USA does.

      I am saying all of this to tell you that by the actual Constitution the Federal gov't has no rights to meddle in economy, it is destructive to economy and people knew it when they wrote it. At this point the gov't is the main reason for its own corruption because it provides those who give it money too much power, that's what corruption is - paying to get privileges and to take away people's rights.

      People are Free People, they must NOT be ruled by a Federal gov't, if they wish to collaborate on local levels (municipal/state) it's then their choice and at least THAT provides competition between states. But what has happened with the Federal gov't is that it completely usurped all the power and now is running a nice little dictatorship there and it's destroying the economy, not saving it every single day, and it's going to get it done, USA will lose its economy and the dollar will be gone.

    32. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      The powers have been usurped, but in a funny way, you are arguing against yourself.

      My position is that gov't must give back all of the power it usurped over the years, the powers that it never was supposed to have, the powers that destroy economy.

      Also you are wrong, the gov't was able to take away all of those powers from people once, regardless of the Constitution, so it must be really easy to usurp those powers and to turn people into slaves. I don't think it's ever a problem for a gov't to slowly nibble away at Freedoms until there are none left, the trick is, how do you take those powers away from the Gov't?

      You are truly arguing that Gov't by giving up what it stole back to the people would be like people usurping powers? It's a straaaange position to have.

    33. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      If you are replying to my comments, then I don't understand your point.

      My point is precisely that there must be NO COMMONS.

      Everything must be owned privately, then any problems are problems between private owners, and I don't think a private owners would lobby to set a liability cap on damages caused by an oil spill in his private property, or do you think people are actually stupid about things like that? Do you come home and take a dump on your kitchen table? What if your guest did, would you be all for it, or would you make him clean up? If he broke your table, would you want it replaced?

      Well, the tragedy of commons is a ruse, the real tragedy is that there are no actual owners.

    34. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by siride · · Score: 1

      "The blood-letting isn't working! The patient is still sick! What should we do?"

      "More blood-letting! The problem is that we simply haven't done enough blood-letting."

      Face it: any solution that calls for an extreme, over-simplified answer is going to be wrong, period. The same is true for the crowd that says almost no government as it is for the crowd that says government solves everything.

    35. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      you can assume all you want and have your little ad hominems all day long, it doesn't change the facts, but I think we don't need to carry on this dialog, because it's not one.

    36. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      Dude, he was illustrating your point with relevant examples from history and the movies (I would have chosen more history, myself, but I suppose more people are into Star Wars ;).

      You've made some massive, idiotic leaps and assumptions about the parent's position that simply are not implied.

      He was simply saying that using a crisis to enact "crisis measures" which become permanent is an old political trick. He was not speaking for or against one way or another (though, frankly, your idea is no better than that of the dirty politicians IMO).

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    37. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      you are confused of-course.

      In a sane system, BP would at least have to BUY that part of the ocean before it could pollute it OR it would have to pay someone, who is the actual owner to drill there and they'd have no liability caps. The gov't owning anything is a disaster, it always is because gov't consists of people who take bribes and generally are bad at what they do. Most importantly they are not the owners of the 'common resources', so why should they care? Do you understand that YOU wouldn't care about that ocean if you were in gov't making decisions, because your interest would be around your ever growing bank account and power that is granted to you really by the companies, who help you to get that power, to be elected, etc.

      So if BP had to buy the ocean or pay to the owners for real, and have real liability, they'd have proper insurance, they wouldn't have any subsidies from gov't, they would pay more attention to their procedures, any spill would have really been an accident and not what it was here - negligence.

      Only real owners really care. Do you care about your apartment? Your car? Do you care about some publicly owned tree somewhere as much? That is tragedy of commons, nobody can be made to care about things far away that they don't actually really own.

      Had BP owned that part of the ocean and had it still spilled the oil, it would have stopped it quicker and it would have had to pay real liability to everybody around, whoever would have BP's oil enter their ocean territory.

      You can laugh, I know it's very difficult to understand and it's not popular with most people because they truly don't understand economy and gov't and they really think that gov't is necessary to do all of these things, but that is the reason for the economy that is dying.

    38. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      You've made some massive, idiotic leaps and assumptions about the parent's position that simply are not implied.

      - no, if you are going to start with things like 'idiotic', you better present a good argument, cause yours is shit.

      Usurping power during crisis is the exact opposite of what I am proposing, which is GIVING UP POWER DURING CRISIS.

      So both, the GP and you are morons for completely missing the point.

    39. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      If gov't GIVING UP power during a crisis to let the economy heal itself is like 'Hitler', then you are like Glen Beck, how about that leap of logic?

    40. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by TFAFalcon · · Score: 1

      But what do you do if someone takes a dump in your neighbors yard. Then another billion people do the same.

      Just because it's not in your house doesn't mean that your house isn't affected by the actions of other people on their own land.

      Take drilling for example. Let's say that person A owns the bay where oil is found. He decides that he can live without the tourism and fishing income that he used to get from his bay, so he starts drilling for oil. Since it's his property and he's just concerned about his profit, he takes a few shortcuts, so his oil rig leaks oil like crazy, but it's cheap so he's still making more money then if he did it carefully and cleanly. To make sure he's not held liable for polluting his neighbors bays he sets up some nets to stop most of the oil from leaking out of his bay.

      Meanwhile, person B owns the next bay along the beach. He has a thriving swimming resort, and his bay is the only place in the world where platinum-fish can be caught, which causes him to be very careful that his water isn't polluted.

      Unfortunately, while the oil from bay one is stopped from leaking out by the nets, tons of dead oil-eating bacteria aren't. Their corpses decompose in the surrounding bays, using up all of the available oxygen in the process.

      Suddenly, his care for the environment can't help person B, since his bay is not isolated from the rest of the world.

      When you speak of the owner protecting natural resources, you forget about simple human greed. A person will protect HIS property in exactly the way that gives him the most profit. If that happens to mess up the property of the guy next door, then screw him.

    41. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 2, Insightful

      According to the "trade balance" view of economy, selling your house/furniture/gadgets/clothes/food to your neighbours to replace it all by a pile of gold made you richer.

      According to the "trade balance" view of economy, as son as some good leaves the country to be replaced by some gold, something positive happened. As soon as some good entered the country and some gold left it something bad happened.

      This view of economy is so moronically stupid it is frightening.

      According to the "government is evil" view of economy, the existence of laws is a perversion to be fought.

      According to the "government is evil" view of economy, it is okay to let restaurants/corporations/(rich) individuals poison their neighbours because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening (but laws are evil, so some ad-hoc mechanism for determining damage need to be established.)

      Fact: if the productive people of Atlas Shrugged all went to an island where there would be no "oppression", they would quickly degenerate in a pre-stone age society (there are real-world examples of this: a rich society is a large society, even though it might seem to be composed of dull individuals). We are collectively rich as we are because we are all interlinked through exchange of goods, services, ideas. For society to function, markets must function. For that, government intervention is required. To break monopolies, to forbid or compensate externalities, to impose transparency. To impose a measure of equality.

      Fact: is that even the very rich and successful need the great masses much more than the masses need them. Equality must be imposed: markets work because the collective decisions f the agents are better than the individual actions. A very unequal society depends on the actions and choice of a small minority, and therefore cannot form functioning markets. If you believe in markets, you must believe in redistribution of wealth. Otherwise, you believe not in markets but in magic.

    42. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by devent · · Score: 1
      No it's not unrealistic. Copyrights have nothing to do with protecting of the work of the author. The fast majority of authors and musicians will never see a dime out of copyright. The only party that have a profit out of copyright are the big publisher that take over the rights of the creator and get a state monopoly on his work. Which is not surprising, because copyright was invented by the big publisher back in the 1710 with the Statute of Anne. From Wikipedia

      As the world's first copyright statute it granted publishers of a book legal protection of 14 years with the commencement of the statute.

      The act is not granting legal protection for the author of a book but for the publisher because only the publisher had the big expensive printing presses back in the 18 century. Before that the only publisher in Britain was the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. It holed the sole right to publish books and was empowered to seize "offending books" that violated the standards of content set by the Church and State.

      300 years later we don't use printing presses anymore, now the author can be the publisher and we finally can get rid of copyrights. For more information please visit http://questioncopyright.org/

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
    43. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Losers do not tell winners what to do.

      Depends how much money the loser owes the winners.
      When winners holds billions/trillions of loser-debt,
      they suddenly become much more in tune with the loser's needs.

    44. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      According to the "trade balance" view of economy, selling your house/furniture/gadgets/clothes/food to your neighbours to replace it all by a pile of gold made you richer.

      According to the "trade balance" view of economy, as son as some good leaves the country to be replaced by some gold, something positive happened. As soon as some good entered the country and some gold left it something bad happened.

      This view of economy is so moronically stupid it is frightening.

      - the only stupid and frightening thing is the lack of logic and the complete non-sequitur of your comment.

      Trade balance has nothing to do with gold, gold is only a store of value but in itself it's just a metal, nothing that is like a real product.
      Trade balance is achieved when people willingly exchange labor at market prices, not labor for pieces of green paper that are becoming less and less useful with each new action some government takes.

      I feel I must tell you this secret about economy you obviously haven't figured out on your own:

      Person A makes fuel.
      Person B makes food.
      They exchange things they make.
      Thus they have an economy.
      Using tokens of exchange (such as gold or fiat currency) works fine, as long as both are feeling they got the best deal based on what the market has to offer.

      If person A stops making fuel and instead starts writing IOUs for the food that person B keeps providing, that's called credit. Providing that food to person A is OK, as long as he can be trusted to return the fuel at some point (probably with interest, whatever market decides). However giving food to person A for an extended period of time becomes less and less viable position for person B, at some point it looks like person A is living on a subsidy and not producing anything BUT IOUs. That's when person B should really cut his costs and run. Sure, the IOUs will be useless, but you have to cut and stop the bleeding. That is what will happen between USA and the countries who are subsidizing it.

      According to the "government is evil" view of economy, the existence of laws is a perversion to be fought.

      - no, involvement of government powers into economy is the evil that corrupts government by providing a reason to corrupt it and destroys economy by killing off competition for those, who corrupt the gov't.

      According to the "government is evil" view of economy, it is okay to let restaurants/corporations/(rich) individuals poison their neighbours because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening (but laws are evil, so some ad-hoc mechanism for determining damage need to be established.)

      - straws. The justice system needs to be in place, that and military for protection of the borders and cops/prisons. So if someone is murdered, it is a legitimate reason to lay down a law, but the law is about damage, it is not about preventing anybody from doing things the way they want, law is only about damaging someone. The specifics must not be written into law, any damage that can be proven has to be enough to apply the punishment/correction.

      Fact: if the productive people of Atlas Shrugged all went to an island where there would be no "oppression", they would quickly degenerate in a pre-stone age society (there are real-world examples of this: a rich society is a large society, even though it might seem to be composed of dull individuals). We are collectively rich as we are because we are all interlinked through exchange of goods, services, ideas. For society to function, markets must function. For that, government intervention is required. To break monopolies, to forbid or compensate externalities, to impose transparency. To impose a measure of equality.

      - fact: if 100 people were on a deserted island for an extended period of time, eventually they would split into classes, some would be richer than others, some would rule others, as long as there was no cris

    45. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      Guys, you can't mode the parent comment as a 5 Interesting while modding this comment as a troll, it's illogical and inconsistent.

    46. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      I already answered it. If you are my neighbor and your pollution enters my premises, I have a case against you, and if gov't can do anything right at all, it should be the justice system to resolve contract issues, property issues and such.

      So a billion people dumping shit on someones lawn doesn't bother anybody until it bothers the neighbors, and it becomes their private fight, unless it becomes so big that an Action Class Lawsuit must be started, and of-course liability caps prevent this from any meaningful outcome. Gov't does not want to do the right thing: give up its involvement in economy, so it will continue 'owning' assets instead of doing the correct thing and selling assets to private people/companies, who then would become actual owners with actual reasons to protect their properties (even if the only reason is not to be sued by neighbors or by a class action)

      The purpose of a Justice system must be resolution of conflict, so if your oil drilling causes my part of ocean to be deprived of oxygen, it's still damage that can be shown. If the cause can be shown then result must be forcing the guilty party to clean up and to pay any retribution.

      By protecting our own pieces of land/water/air, whatever we take care of it, we care as owners. The gov't is this big amorphous blob, in itself it doesn't care, but as individual people in it, it's even worse: many get special treatment to not pay attention and even to allow damages and removal of liabilities on purpose.

      You really believe your gov't will prevent the next oil spill better than a private owner ever could? You are mistaken. A private owners wouldn't allow anybody to drill for oil without really serious approach to security against pollution and definitely wouldn't set liability caps and would require the drilling/pumping companies to carry enough insurance to cover possible liability costs.

      It's just not in nature of people to care about things they don't own.

    47. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      only for some time. In reality money is not really useful in economy without some value to back the money up. When it becomes too painfully clear that these particular money is useless, it's just going to be written off as a bad debt. Sure, the creditor will suffer, but the country, who now will lose its credit (in terms of trade especially) will suffer insanely more. The creditor will recover because the creditor has a strong producing economy.

    48. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by TFAFalcon · · Score: 1

      But nearly everything you do in your garden will affect your neighbors.

      Plant flowers? Pollen causes allergies.
      Plant trees? Cut off sunlight and stop wind.
      Chop down trees? Speed up soil erosion.

      All of these can be counted as 'damage'. So if you only have private parties and the legal system to mitigate 'damage', then no1 will ever be able to do ANYTHING.

      And what about greenhouse gasses? Just about everything produces them. Who do you sue when your land turns into a desert? The damage caused individually by each person can be close to zero, but combined it can destroy the value of your property.

      And what about indirect damage? If I spray my fields with a toxin that wipes out all of the bees living on neighbors land, but he doesn't care about it. You on the other hand were relying on them to pollinate your flower farm. Who do you sue? You don't directly have standing to so either your neighbor, who did nothing, or me since I didn't directly harm you in any way.

      The world is too connected to be kept safe by each person just taking care of his own land and suing people that damage it.

      You need a government to give overall rules of protecting the environment. It might not be very effective, but it's still better then what we'd have if people were left to decide for themselves what they consider to be 'good' for their property.

    49. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Shark · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And that collective will is called, you guessed it, government.

      That collective is called 'the people'. Government is supposed to be of/for/by the people but it clearly isn't anymore.

      I'm not really trying to defend parent even though I can find some philosophical common ground with him. I, however, do not think the solution is getting rid of all regulations, I think it would be more reasonable to actually start *applying* existing law equally to everyone first. Two things would happen then. Corporations would stop breaking them, and we'd find a whole lot of laws that are incredibly bad and should be repealed. I propose a moratorium on new laws until we've gone through the existing set and put them through a constitutional filter.

      Anyway, I think it is highly idealized of you, especially given today's state of things, to think the US government and the US people are the same entity.

      It is the specific intent of the constitution to limit the power of government on its people. Such is not the case in current day United States.

      --
      Mind the frickin' laser...
    50. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 1

      About the gold: mercantilism was invented in the age of gold, before fiat money. And it almost made sense then: you could only grow your economy if there was enough gold. Of course this is stupid, but it was thus then. Now it truly makes no sense at all.

      About the 100 people: thank you for proving you live in a fantasy world. You clearly have no notion of the complexity and the sheer number of intervening parties required for the making of the simplest of the devices you may buy. Hint: you are wrong by about seven orders of magnitude (this number is not made up, it is a reasonable estimate of the population in the so-called developed world contributing to production off all goods and services, which in turn are all interdependent). This is being amazingly wrong.

      The USSR was not wrong because it sought equality. It was wrong because it enforced it bloodily. It was not inefficient because it was brutal, it was inefficient because it believed the labour theory of value. Which is wrong: a glass of water has not the same value whether you are thirsty or not.

      It is very inefficient to have a highly unequal society for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. Equality of opportunity is not just about equal access to education and capital. For these to be meaningful, wealth must not be allowed to accumulate -- meaning earning taxes, and high inheritance taxes, and a suitably high inflation. Because those born in wealthy families always will have a head start, but at least you can make sure that they have to keep working hard to stay wealthy... This means that welfare, which is about keeping people in a state where they can keep looking for (self-)employment is a function of government to achieve equality of opportunity.

      Unless life is Russian roulette, and you get a single shot at trying things.

      The belief that government can be reduced to a pure regalian minimum is silly: it makes sense in a dictatorship, where the welfare of the people is not a prime concern, but in the case of a democracy, putting the onus of finding out who is breaking laws on the victims is somewhat ridiculous (basically, you are saying that having enough professional assassins on payroll should be a good idea: no live victims/relatives, no lawsuit!)

      Oh, you did not mean it like that. But then you need agencies to check for abuses! Control and regulation are a function of government.

      Also, there is a myth, a mythology of the business, started from nothing. This happens, but is rare. It should be encouraged, but not at the cost of the rest of society. Success which costs society is no success at all: think microsoft... Again, powerful regulation agencies are important. You need to be consistent: either the gov stifles businesses through regulations, which means no business becomes powerful enough to be influential, or business can influence regulations, which is clearly a case for more power to the gov, not to the businesses!

    51. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      You have so many things to say as a response to my very simple message, it's incredible.

      --
      1. Gold makes sense today as much as ever as a store of value.
      If you don't think so, then don't go to kitco.com and don't check out the prices of gold,
      silver and other metals. But a hint: they are going up because fiat currencies are being destroyed by printing.
      Gold is what some call: capital on strike. It means the times are bad and getting worse. Save your money, throw it out and get gold instead.

      What your problem is that you don't understand what money actually is. Money is a token of value, which can be printed only by a producer of value.
      When gov't prints money without adding value to the economy, it simply reduces everybody's value of money and that's inflation and that causes prices to rise.
      It's like a tax but it's invisible.
      Money should only be printed by private companies that produce value: you add some value by taking a resource and turning it into a product that has some price
      on the market, you can then print as much value as you produced on a token, that's real money, that's how they do it in Hong Kong (well, there are 3 private banks that
      print money except for the city gov't itself). Of-course this also leads to natural inflation, because products get consumed, but the tokens stay, but this inflation is much
      lower than what gov't does.

      2. About 100 people: you are a naive person, I am talking about very hypothetical situation. However my great-grandparents, who lived in Ukraine, had 18 kids,
      15 were killed by USSR's communists during thirties as was my great-grandmother. They were pretty much self sufficient on their farm, but the village had some other workers
      like a blacksmith for example. Yes, they didn't have computers, but they farmed themselves and fed themselves. Even further out people survived by hunting/gathering, and those 100
      people would become hunters/gatherers/farmers, obviously they wouldn't have nice Nike shoes or TVs. So your point is kind of stupid.

      3. USSR was wrong because it took things from people who made them, and stole those things (like food and buildings, and lands, etc) and destroyed the people who
      could work and make things and it sold those things. What they created is a crowd of people unable to think and provide for themselves. They de-evolved people.
      Not everybody, but a lot of people. Those who didn't de-evolve did better, invented something, but during Stalin it was very dangerous to be an enterprising person like that.

      4. Gov't is the cause of the very unequal society, I already made that point. Gov't kills off competition and creates monopolies, thus you end up with very unequal society.
      There is nothing else to add here.

      5. You are not only ignorant of economics and politics, but you don't even understand what dictatorship means! I am so wasting my time on you, because you are definitely not
      going to learn anything from this, unbelievable. A dictator would have a HUGE GOVERNMENT. MUCH BIGGER than any 'democratic' gov't. You are so bizare as a person, it's like
      talking to an alien.

      6. Control and regulations are only what you want them to be, and I don't want a gov't controling and regulating anything. I want OWNERS to do their own work and to take care of their own properties.

      7. Microsoft is a success built on a contract with a monopolist: IBM. IBM was even sued as a monopolist at some point by US gov't and gov't lost over a decade of battling. It is always a huge
      irony to see a gov't suing a company for using its monopoly power illegaly, when the company became monopoly due to huge deals with gov'ts.

      Anyway, you are so tiring and useless and ignorant, it's like talking to an ant, I can't continue with you, you are wrong on every single thing, must be a very easy life for you, because ignorance as they say, is bliss.

    52. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      I would imagine that you could sue anybody for all of those things today anyway, it's up to the courts, but I believe most of what you propose for lawsuits would be considered frivolous, I did say I am for a WORKING Justice system, not for a clogged one, didn't I?

      As to your entire argument about 'green house emissions' if the damage by separate people is negligible, then you can't argue for any damage at all! Can you actually PROVE that there is damage?

      Right, but the correct response is not going to come from gov't, it's going to be some new tech from private sector that will eliminate dependence on oils, whoever comes out with this will become a trillionaire, so there is a good incentive.

      Gov't is not there to protect you from not having your neighbors bees either! Since those are not your bees, you have pretty much no moral right to sue anyway, get your own goddamn bees!

      People today do NOT GET THE KIND OF PROTECTION that you are advocating here for! It's amazing that you are going out of your way to try and come up with examples, none of which you get any protection from by your actual gov't. Is there some magic place in your head where you keep the gov't you'd LIKE to have because the one you have doesn't give a shit about common resources the way you present and that's because the actual real gov't consists of people who just want to take something, they are not owners of a land or air or water, what do they care? BP spill was not the first, it's not going to be the last and there is nothing that gov't will do about it and you still argue that it is the correct way to continue, are you in some sort of a loop?

    53. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 1

      Gold is worth nothing. Actually, it is worth something because you can make shiny things with it (and in more recent times electronic components). It is worth something because people think it is worth something. Exactly like fiat money, except that it depends on mines for production instead of trees:) . For someone who is so adamantly anti-communist you believe very strongly in Marxist economics...

      2. You will find that the blacksmith needs a mine, ore, miners for its raw material. That building/repairing his works requires the production of cement/a stone quarry. That he might know how to work iron, but not make alloys. That hunter-gatherer societies never expand because they die of hunger. You will find that knowledge and the availability of tools dwindle with time and isolation, until you are left with a very primitive society.

      3. Yes, bad because bloody. Can you read?

      4. No Somalia is a very unequal society, and has no functioning government. Sweden is a vary equal society with a very strong government. Eastern Europe/the USSR were very equal societies, but indicates equality/inequality is not so simple and the way it is achieved is very important. Also that the difference between good and bad equality is not intervention or not of the government. In fact, almost all societes on Earth have governments, some are very equal, some very unequal. Some are prosperous, some not. Government size is not very relevant. Its policies are, and you will find that absence of policy is not optimal.

      5. No. a lot of the south American dictators had very small government, reduced to their regalian functions. And very unequal societies. And bloody oppression. Administration can be a tool for the oppression, but not always so.

      6. Owners cannot regulate anything: they do not, cannot have the expertise required. The world is infinitely more complex than you imagine. And yes, you are talking to the equivalent of alien: our worlds are not the same, and yours is clearly very simple and very small. As an exercise, take any object around you, and try to think about how it was built. Think about the countless hours of ingenuity, work that go into the object, its part, the tools, the tools for the tools, the delivery, the marketing, how it was bought, how it was chosen, about the houses for the workers, the engineers, the design thereof, the schools and universities, the tools for writing the design, the knowledge, the artistic history of its design.

      Marvel that we can do anything at all. Realise that society needs institutions. That you cal them government is not important.

      7. So the company has more power than the gov? and the gov is too powerful? Or perhaps you live in a world too simply to be even remotely consistent.

      I am not really talking to you, I am talking to the readers of this conversation. Because your ideas are noxious: they try to convince people that they should be at each other's throat instead of collaborating. You wish for a world were violence rules. You wish for a simple society where everything can be understood, thinking it would be better, despite the fact that such societies have existed and still exist, and are thoroughly undesirable.

      You are like the people who would like to stop progress in the name of Nature, because they think they understand the XVIIth century. You are like the anarchist who think a brotherly society is possible only if everyone does everything in turn, forgetting this is was not even possible 2000 years ago.

      Progress is complexity. A tool to manage a complex system is complex. Government have to be complex. This means that they will fail often, but they are still required.

    54. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by TFAFalcon · · Score: 1

      The government does quite a few things to protect the environment (at least where I live). Such as emission standards for vehicles and industry, prohibition of overpowered insecticides, prohibition against using too many much fertilizer/sprays in areas where ground water is used clean water source, natural parks where almost everything that affects the environment is prohibited, toxic waste disposal rules,.........

      As for the BP spill. Do you think that,in your world where all environmental protection is done by landowners, anyone would have even tried to keep the oil off the beaches? Would the owners have cooperated and invested all of the money necessary to rent ships, nets etc? (I know that way too much oil still got through, but it could have been worse)
      And what would have happened when they sued BP? If it looked like the price of the clean up was going to be too high, the main corporation would have syphoned off it's US subsidiaries assets, then declared it bankrupt. And without a big hammer to use against it, all of the victims would be even more screwed then they are today.

    55. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      all of the things you are describing are a function of a working economy, not of a gov't, as to insecticides, it's a private matter of people on their own property, same logic. Who's a gov't to tell me I am using 'too much fertilizer'? WTH? If my chemicals are getting in the water then it's a different issue, again same logic. Toxic waste disposal - if all land is private, it's up to the owners to decide whether they want to own a disposal location or not.

      The beaches must be privatized just as well. The beaches mostly are private anyway, so no difference, same logic. Besides which, the entire point is that BP didn't care about liability, so they didn't care about procedures, in a system where liability are not capped by gov't, the spill could have been avoided and probably would have been, this was no accident, this was negligence BECAUSE the gov't socializes the costs. BP as a company shouldn't even exist. It's what used to be known as Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the one that used its gov'ts ties in UK and US to overthrow the democratically elected gov't of Iran, for crying out loud, this is insane how much this company gets from gov'ts in the way of all sorts of money and literally killing.

    56. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      I don't want to talk to you, you are making up positions for me as if they are mine in every sentence, it's like talking to a waterfall of verbal diarrhea, like this nonsense:

      you believe very strongly in Marxist economics.

      - you are like the most bizarre person, I do respond to people who talk to me normally, but you are just something else, I don't possess enough words in English language that can be used in this conversation, too bad you don't speak Russian or French, or do you?

      Marxist economics? The guy who messed up even simple understanding of capitalism and mercantilism? Gold is worth nothing? You do realize that gold actually LASTS FOREVER even in harshest conditions, it's not paper and even by the mere fact of not corroding it stores value, do you? Gold is a natural limited resource and it make a great store of value, it's capital on strike, it's what always keeps value when currencies fail. It's not a question of what you believe, it's a question of HISTORY. History shows gold is valuable more than any paper. ALL currencies that existed eventually disappeared, and ALL currencies that exist today will disappear and people will continue still trading in gold. Even USA had gold backed currency until Nixon. Was USA Marxist? You are insane, purely insane.

      You need to find somebody else to torture with your nonsense, bye bye.

    57. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 1

      Note to eventual moderators. I am trying to get a point across (in French after failing in English). I will probably fail, but hey, it's worth a try.

      Alors on va essayer en français.

      Imaginons la situation suivante: dans le désert, un voyageur a soif. Un génie lui propose une gourde pleine d'eau ou de l'or.

      Le voyageur choisit naturellement l'eau (sauf dans les fables, où il sera puni).

      L'eau et l'or n'ont de valeur autre que ce qu'on leur attribue. Et cette valeur dépend des circonstances. C'est en tout cas ce que la théorie économique moderne suppose.

      Marx, lui, pense que les chose ont une valeur intrinsèque qui dépend de la quantité de travail fournie pour produire la chose, ici, miner et transporter l'or et de la rareté des choses. De la même manière les mercantilistes imaginent que la valeur des choses est intrinsèque (et se mesure en or) de sorte que la balance commerciale est importante.

      C'est la même erreur fondamentale. Les choses ne valent rien en elles-même, la monnaie ne vaut rien, l'or ne vaut rien. Les choses ont une valeur seulement parce que nous, par une opération de l'esprit, leur attribuont de la valeur. Il en est ainsi de l'or. Croire en la valeur intrinsèque des choses, c'est le début de la théorie marxiste.

    58. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      ce n'etait pas necessaire

    59. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      Awesome. With your plan we should be back to Lords and Serfs in only a few generations. I can hardly wait !

    60. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      Raw materials are not the problem, at least not for the next few thousands of years, there is Canada and Russia and Africa and probably the Arctic, those have more materials than we can use for now.

      Please tell us all about the raw materials available in the Arctic.

      Heck, even if you meant the Antarctic, the practicalities of extraction means anything there may as well not exist.

    61. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 1

      Gross manufacturing output measurement is completely independent from GDP.

      Here's the reference:

      For the United States, the output measure for the manufacturing sector is a chain-weighted index of real gross product originating (deflated value added) produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. For more information on the U.S. measure, see "Improved Estimates of Gross Product by Industry for 1947-98," Survey of Current Business, June 2000, pp. 24-38 and "Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1947-86. New Estimates Based on the North American Industry Classification System," Survey of Current Business, December 2005, pp. 70-84.

      As far as raw materials lasting for millennia into the future boy do I have news for you. Perhaps this site will give you a realistic assessment.

      http://www.theoildrum.com/

      And as far as human ingenuity, sure we can do a lot with that. But thermodynamics is immutable, and that's end of story.

    62. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by shentino · · Score: 1

      Uh huh.

      And tell me how that'll work when I get some greedy bastard that cares more about selling his land off to the highest bidder than he does about protecting the environment.

      The thing about private property is that it can be bought and sold.

    63. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can laugh, I know it's very difficult to understand and it's not popular with most people because they truly don't understand economy and gov't

      Thanks, I did laugh.

    64. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      The USA is a unique society, well, it WAS before, now Switzerland looks more like what USA tried to be than USA does.

      Anyone who has actually lived in both Switzerland and the US will know how laughable this comparison is.

      If you want the government out of your life and no regulation, then Switzerland is not the place for you. Everything from mandatory military service and healthcare, through government IDs, to having to inform the local authorities when you move house - and that's just the Federal government. There's even more fun stuff at the "State" and "local" levels of Government.

    65. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      Yes, that's the point that everything can be bought and sold, why is selling your property to the highest bidder a problem again? If you cause damage to your neighbor's property, you will have to deal with the neighbor, if you cause damage to many neighbors, you'll have to deal with many of them.

      1. Lawsuits usually do not go away just because you sell your property.
      2. Anybody buying a property will have to do all the fact checking with a lawyer, just like you have to do now, to see if there are any outstanding legal/financial/environmental issues with the property, full disclosure.

      So what is the problem and what is the difference between that and what's happening now again from your perspective?

    66. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      forget about gdp and the manufacturing output, only 1 thing counts in a global economy where your creditors are other nations: trade balance. You don't have it, you have a huge imbalance, this means you are not trading fairly, for products you do not give back products but paper, and those IOUs are only good for a while, soon the t-bill bubble will burst and take down the dollar.

      And you don't have any interesting 'news' for me. Oil is going to end? Sure, eventually it will end. I was talking about all natural resources, not just oil, but we will not see oil ending this century, it will be a more expensive barrel that is harder to extract, however ending oil dependency is not a bad thing, we have to move on anyway, nuclear must be the correct direction, all the other alternatives will cover some local needs, but nuclear is what we must do more and more globally.

      Oh boy, am I tired from people replying to this thread without reading it, it's all the same all the same all the time.

    67. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      cantons, not states. But Switzerland is MOVING in the right direction, it is going to abolish the mandatory military eventually. However most importantly is that federal gov't is not collecting income tax, that taxing is about cantons, and income is not necessarily what they do, there is competition between them. As to informing upon moving - that's the entire Europe's problem (and Russia's as well.)

    68. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      what, you don't think you are a serf now? Serf to your mortgage at your bank, which is part of your gov't due to subsidies and 0% interest rates?

      You are not a serf? My plan is returning to the principles of Constitution, by which you are a Free person. Your response, more like a knee-jerk response, is an example of how far the US has moved away from Constitution, both physically and mentally.

    69. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 1

      The 600 pound gorilla in the room as far as trade balance goes is oil. Fix that and the US trade balance isn't that bad.

      Of course you can't fix it short of running out of oil.

      The problem is there is no real replacement for it. Liquid high energy density fuel is what the heavy transportation that is the heart of the economy runs on. Nuclear is an ok proposal for electricity generation - the question is can you build practical plants fast enough, but for running trains planes ships trucks etc. not so much.

    70. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      There is a beautiful replacement, Russia and probably Canada are full of it - natural gas.

      Trade balance is huge, and it's not about oil. All of the oil trade is balanced by food exports from US.

    71. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by Skjellifetti · · Score: 1

      Hey Tex, you plan on branding every fish in the sea to show who has ownership? The world is vastly more complex than your simplistic libertarian fantasy world.

    72. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by ivucica · · Score: 1
      You don't seem to see my point, which is: People Abuse. Eliminating all regulation (not just bad and excessive regulation) means people will get to be assholes. Want a society with no government and no taxes (at least as you know them)? Go to Somalia. Too warlike? Well, you can always go live on Tokelau.

      After reading this post more carefully, you seem to equate government with US Federal Government. Sure, perhaps your Federal Government has too much power over State Government, but you advocate abolishing all government.

      You're also repeatedly doing ad-hominems against me -- there was no need to call me ignorant, and then again order me to learn . A true teacher would not rise above the one who needs to learn and attack him. A true teacher would just teach. Your comments should stand as comments, and separate from the lessons.

      Please, don't be smug considering the US ideals "the best ones". They're not. Remember that your precious Constitution did not protect against slavery, nor did it initially protect your precious freedom of speech. And in the end, it's just a piece of paper which seems to provide only American citizens its rights. Remember another nation that had understood the concept of "rights for my citizens only"? That's right, it's called Rome and its citizens were Roman citizens.

      "We are ruled by a Federal government's dictatorship! *moan*" -- well, guess what: you elected that government, hence it's not dictatorship. Some call it democracy (which is not what I'd call any so-called democracy as they exist today -- perhaps Elected Oligarchy is a better name).

      "Federal government has no right to meddle in the economy" -- so, sue them. If it violates the Constitution, Supreme Court will decide that, won't it?

      "The constitution doesn't grant rights, because it says all people have rights as is" -- hah. Nitpicking a bit, eh? US and Russian constitutions aren't the only ones, and many have wording similar to the US regarding granting rights. In fact, let's take a look at Croatian constitution and compare the wording to the United States constitution. US constitution itself does not grant rights -- its amendments do! In fact, original US constitution doesn't seem to say anywhere that any rights are derived from it; it seems to grant only powers! Compare to Croatian constitution, which explicitly lists numerous rights inalienable to Croatian citizens and anyone within Croatian territory.

      Even worse, when we reach the first amendment, it does not guarantee a right -- it guarantees that the Congress shall not pass a law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

      Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

      What about Croatian constitution?

      III.2.22: Man's freedom and personality shall be inviolable.
      No one shall be deprived of liberty, nor may his liberty be restricted, except when so specified by law, which shall be decided by a court.

      III.2.38: Freedom of thought and expression of thought shall be guaranteed. Freedom of expression shall specifically include freedom of the press and other media of communication, freedom of speech and public expression, and free establishment of all institutions of public communication.
      Censorship shall be forbidden. Journalists shall have the right to freedom of reporting and access to information.
      The right to correction shall be guaranteed to anyone whose constitutionally determined rights have been violated by public communication.
      III.2.40: Freedom of conscience and religion and free public profession of

    73. Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 1

      That's ridiculous. The US imports 5 times more oil in dollar value than they export in food.

  10. Encryption wont protect you from informants. by elucido · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now is really the time to get encrypted, decentralized networks with Onion routing working at a practical level and not just for academic enjoyment. I've had great expectations in GNUnet, but apparently it is pretty hard to port. Freenet has also never convinced me whenever I tried it. Are the technical obstacles really so hard to overcome? What about pervasive email encryption with automatic installation and more widespread use of SSL? What is holding all these technologies back?

    Once something is made significantly illegal and if the government is motivated enough, they'll pay their informants to infiltrate your private encrypted network and capture the IP addresses that way. The informants will host the exit nodes.

    1. Re:Encryption wont protect you from informants. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You can't trace someone on TOR or Freenet just by holding the exit nodes.

      There are still ways to trace someone though. For example,

      1. Release 'pirate' music in WMA format with an embedded DRM licence request. As soon as WMP opens such a file, it'll contact the server specified in the file to request a licence - your tracking server.
      2. Release 'pirate' software with a phone-home bug added.
      3. The Google-Fu. Search through your target's postings. Do they mention a state? A pet name? Do their post timeings never include school hours? A hundred little bits of trivia can be put together into a complete picture which may be of use in locating them. Due to the amount of effort this takes, it won't be used on the low-level targets. But if you do something that justifies extreme effort, like release the tool that cracks the successor to blu-ray, then no expense will be spared. A simple blu-ray rip will easily reveal the country of origin, by the video standard, logos present and exactly which scenes were cut to comply with local censorship laws.
      4. Social. Have your agent make contact 'accidentially' and build up a relationship. It may take a while, but you only have to to get the target to agree to follow one single web link to get a fix.

    2. Re:Encryption wont protect you from informants. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Let me guess: you have no idea how Freenet, I2P or Tor work. Hint: none of them are "private encrypted networks", they're all pseudonymous [encrypted] networks. If it were so easy to catch people who do $bad_things, these networks would have failed the litmus test (presence of "child porn"). Since they do contain plenty of child porn, I would say you don't know shit about what you're talking about.

    3. Re:Encryption wont protect you from informants. by sexconker · · Score: 1

      You can't trace someone on TOR or Freenet just by holding the exit nodes.

      You can trace someone just by being a part of th network, no nodes needed.

      At some point there is copyrighted material on the network unencrypted (identifiable as copyrighted material).
      If a copyright holder were to offer up said copyrighted material, anyone and everyone who touches a single piece of it, encrypted or not, becomes a legal target.

      An RIAA guy sharing "Look at my Dick - Lady Gaga.mp3" can and will sue everyone he sends an encrypted chunk of that file to. Who gives a shit who it was destined for? Who gives a shit if the users it was sent to couldn't even decrypt the thing? They're still distributing copyrighted material without permission. How many 3-piece lawyers can you afford?

      If you're hoping to get off because the copyright holder (or an authorized agent, or a blackmailed pirate they got to via other means) is the one distributing the material, think again. The can simply join the network as a regular user, request the song about lady gaga's mancock, and then sue everyone who sends them a chunk of that data.

      If the proxies say "Sorry, I don't know who that IP belongs to", proxies will come under legal attack, legislation will be written requiring them to keep records of IP addresses for X amount of time, and anyone using a proxy will be put on a damned watch list.

    4. Re:Encryption wont protect you from informants. by sexconker · · Score: 1

      If it were so easy to catch people who do $bad_things, these networks would have failed the litmus test (presence of "child porn").

      Seems to me child porn isn't really fought over by the major copyright holders.

      As for the government, I guess you missed the news:

      In a related inquiry, the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) cross-checked the ICE list against military databases to come up with a list of Defense employees and contractors who appeared to be guilty of purchasing child pornography. The names included staffers for the secretary of defense, contractors for the ultra-secretive National Security Agency, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the DCIS opened investigations into only 20 percent of the individuals identified, and succeeded in prosecuting just a handful.

      http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot...ld-pornography

  11. No I did not by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 1

    Some of us are aliens who do not even live in the USA. And we certainly did not vote for a world-wide police state.

    --
    Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
    1. Re:No I did not by Jafafa+Hots · · Score: 1

      Wow! Well you just gave the lie to the conceit in the US and Hollywood that the aliens would only ever decide to visit (or attack) in America!

      --
      This space available.
  12. re by JohnVanVliet · · Score: 1

    i like this bit "adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures." well seeing as there are NO effective technologies to prevent the circumvention ... the old story about building a better mouse trap .

    --
    "I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
  13. If it's in the treaty it will supersede U.S laws by Eternal+Vigilance · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the US ...is still holding out hope of establishing...rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by US courts.

    That would be precisely why the forces of intellectual darkness and their minions within the U.S. government are pushing for this with such rabidity, and in such secrecy. Unless it's flat-out unconstitutional (a much, much narrower standard than simply "illegal"), anything in this treaty will supersede U.S. courts and U.S. law.

    "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little...ah, fuck it. We do the unconstitutional immediately, too."

  14. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Runaway1956 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your ass, dude. It's not like the United States is the Lone Ranger, riding at the cutting edge of technology, all alone. FFS, pimple faced kids around the world manage to hack into the Department of Defense computers. Our high tech people sweat at night, worrying about China hacking into their computers. Information your ass. Our PRIMARY export right now is "entertainment". The word is placed in quotations, because it is hardly entertaining to anyone with a lick of sense. Only the brainwashed, ignorant masses can actually PAY for the drivel pumped out from Hollywood and the music industries. I might consider paying them to STOP PRODUCING!

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  15. You forgot one little deal. by sidragon.net · · Score: 1
  16. Enough is enough by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If the DMCA provision passes, I promise that from that point I won't spend a single cent on anything made by anybody who supports or takes advantage of it, and that I will make every effort discourage other people and companies from purchasing those things.

    All my money will instead go on software, hardware and music without DRM and under liberal licenses, as well as organizations that oppose this kind of legislation. I will especially contribute to any attempts to eliminate patents and heavily restrict copyright.

    1. Re:Enough is enough by Larryish · · Score: 1

      Me too!

    2. Re:Enough is enough by Dan667 · · Score: 1

      you should just do that anyway. People that are pushing this are doing it for free money, might as well let them know now that your are not going to buy their real product as long as they continue to champion stuff like this.

    3. Re:Enough is enough by Idiomatick · · Score: 1

      Bravo~

    4. Re:Enough is enough by tepples · · Score: 1

      All my money will instead go on software, hardware and music without DRM

      What will happen when you can no longer buy a new computing device without DRM?

    5. Re:Enough is enough by vadim_t · · Score: 1

      I suppose I'll start giving more support to devices like Openmoko (doubt that's going to become illegal), or worst case, give money to the Pirate Party or whoever tries to reverse it.

    6. Re:Enough is enough by tepples · · Score: 1
      In Slashdot comments, Alsee has posited a scenario in which all home ISPs start requiring Trusted Network Connect. So you need to be using an approved and unmodified operating system, or you don't get a routable IP address. And even if your ISP does allow customers to run Linux, it's effectively Tivoized because you can only run (say) Ubuntu with the official kernel.

      I suppose I'll start giving more support to devices like Openmoko (doubt that's going to become illegal)

      Carriers can refuse service to any device that they want. GSM, for example, has the EIR which allows for a "blacklist" of unapproved IMEIs. Ostensibly, EIR allows disabling stolen handsets, but it can also be used to give zero bars to any device that doesn't implement whatever digital imprimatur scheme the IFPI-beholden carriers choose.

      or worst case, give money to the Pirate Party or whoever tries to reverse it.

      Let me know when the Pirate Party has gained even one seat in the United States Senate.

    7. Re:Enough is enough by vadim_t · · Score: 1

      In Slashdot comments, Alsee has posited a scenario in which all home ISPs start requiring Trusted Network Connect. So you need to be using an approved and unmodified operating system, or you don't get a routable IP address. And even if your ISP does allow customers to run Linux, it's effectively Tivoized because you can only run (say) Ubuntu with the official kernel.

      I think such scenarios are still pretty far away, and in any case the internet isn't the only way of networking that exists.

      Carriers can refuse service to any device that they want. GSM, for example, has the EIR which allows for a "blacklist" of unapproved IMEIs. Ostensibly, EIR allows disabling stolen handsets, but it can also be used to give zero bars to any device that doesn't implement whatever digital imprimatur scheme the IFPI-beholden carriers choose.

      There's an open source GSM implementation now. Presumably it could identify itself under any arbitrary IMEI. Of course if things get to that point it's going to be messy. Also I don't see that happening just yet. People are getting sick of the restrictions already.

      Let me know when the Pirate Party has gained even one seat in the United States Senate.

      I'm not in the US, but I'm sure it'll get a few seats if anything like the above happens. A large amount of people just don't have enough things to be concerned about yet.

      Anyway, my stance is simple: I will push back in whatever ways are available to me, and do everything possible to make such things unprofitable.

    8. Re:Enough is enough by tepples · · Score: 1

      the internet isn't the only way of networking that exists.

      An "internet" originally referred to any wide-area network. To create a private internet in parallel to the commercial Internet, you'd have to have some sort of last mile. Right now, the wired last mile is controlled by the cable and phone companies, and the wireless last mile is controlled by national radio regulators such as the FCC. Meshes don't easily reach from one town to another.

      There's an open source GSM implementation now. Presumably it could identify itself under any arbitrary IMEI.

      Forging an IMEI to evade EIR is theft of service, or whatever they call it in your home country. (I couldn't look up your home country based on your "Homepage" because homecreatures.com has expired.)

  17. Re:You can't have it both ways. by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    if you think information goes only one way then you don't understand any society.

    Information is not just an export, but an import as well.

  18. Wikileaks is not the victim. by drzin69 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I guess Wikileaks does have to leak out government docs. One more thing...." The British music industry has called for a truce with the technology firms with whom it has till now fought a bitter battle over rights, royalties and file sharing.

    Feargal Sharkey, CEO of lobby group UK Music, told a conference in London this week that it was time for the music and technology industries to set aside their differences and strive instead toward a common goal: nothing less than the total global domination of British music.

    Sharkey, a campaigner against people copying music on the internet and the technology they use, said it had become apparent that technology and creativity were inseparable.

    "It's now time for ISPs and tech companies to sit down together and possibly for the first time have a broad adult conversation. Our future is now totally dependent, totally entwined, totally symbiotic," he told an audience of industry, government and media at the Westminster Forum this morning....."

    http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/9/4/uk-music-calls-truce-technology/
    Sharkey was on rousing form. The former pop star called dramatically for the mobilization of British music and technology producers: "By 2020. We. Want. To rival. The United States. As the largest. Source of repertoire. And artistry. In. The. World."

  19. American Idea by andersh · · Score: 1

    Who cares if your American diplomats sign any agreements, it's your government that created and is forcing ACTA on the majority of the world!

    It's not "treason" when your country desires it, at least your court system still believes the US is a republic. For how long is another question.

    1. Re:American Idea by v1 · · Score: 1

      It's not "treason" when your country desires it

      But that hinges on what you define as "your ountry"... so, is it what the government desires, or what its citizens desire?

      Naturally, the government would have it be the former, tho I prefer the latter.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  20. Re:You can't have it both ways. by pantherace · · Score: 1

    Don't forget food and guns. The US exports a lot of those.

  21. Re:If it's in the treaty it will supersede U.S law by Late+Adopter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's only if it's ratified in the Senate as a treaty. The Obama administration has already signaled that they want to enact it as an executive agreement if possible.

  22. Extreme measures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How far will this shit have to go before we start shooting these fat bastards in the face?

  23. Re:If it's in the treaty it will supersede U.S law by jambarama · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not an expert on this, but I believe Presidents can enter into executive agreements with other countries only until the President's actions affect US citizenry. Then we've got an ultra vires issue or presentment problem unless congress passes the agreement.

    Executive agreements obviously cannot violate the Constitution. Since the Reid v. Covert decision, the U.S. has made it explicit that although the U.S. intends to abide by a treaty, if the treaty is ruled in violation of the Constitution by federal courts, then the U.S. legally can't follow the treaty since the U.S. signature would be ultra vires.

    Plus treaty law (including executive agreements, congressional-executive treaties, and real treaties) is incorporated into the body of U.S. federal law. So congress can modify or repeal treaties afterwards, and SCOTUS can review it.

    However, I'm still wary. According to an EFF article published in The Yale Journal of International Law [PDF]. Even if this article is true, the agreements are still subject to modification after they're passed, but that shouldn't be good enough.

  24. Sorry, reality just isn't that simple. by Scott+Wood · · Score: 1

    You seem to be assuming a justice system that is beyond just nominally "working", but 100% efficient and cost-free to the harmed party, and that everyone is going to have full knowledge, and ample evidence, of the harms that are about to be inflicted upon them (or are being inflicted).

    Your example of people getting sent to jail for things like drug possession is curious -- that's an instance of the government pursuing criminal charges, not of individuals bringing civil lawsuits. Exactly the thing that you say doesn't work (not that the War on Drugs(tm) is all that successful, but that's another matter...). If someone breaks into my home, steals my things, and shoots me, should it be up to my next of kin to gather evidence, hire a lawyer, and file a lawsuit against the perpetrator?

    Should I file the pollution lawsuit after I've got cancer, and find out what was being dumped into the water supply? Small comfort that'll be, and maybe the entity responsible (at least on paper) doesn't even exist anymore.

    1. Re:Sorry, reality just isn't that simple. by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      BP dumped millions of gallons of oil into the ocean, what is going to be the result? You'd have to wait, probably some people will die from something related to this incident not counting the 11 dead already. So then what's the difference?

      The difference is that if BP had to drill on their own property or on property of some actual owner and not a government "nobody's" property, they'd be more liable for any damage, they'd have to carry real insurance, they'd have to pay attention to their equipment and procedures because they costs would not have been capped by any corrupted gov't.

      Because when you have neighbors and private properties, you can't ignore them as easily as when it's all government's and really nobody owns it, nobody cares about it.

      My point about somebody going to jail for drugs is just that it appears a gov't can put a person it doesn't like to jail, so it's not impossible to punish individuals and it should be possible to punish corporations AND individuals, this entire idea of 'limited liability' is a nice trick played on all people, there is no such thing, it's always possible to find somebody responsible for any action.

      People's lives are only important to gov't because those people pay taxes, they are really just resources to be milked. So in a way it is true, nobody cares if you got killed except for your family/friends. But I didn't say anything specific about how a Justice system should be structured and how such events should be approached, I am not a judge or a lawyer.

      But I never said that Justice system must be funded by separate people case by case, it has to be funded from taxes obviously, I have problem with taxes on income, but not with levies on sales. Sales tax is the tax that gives incentive to produce and takes away incentive to consume, and that is what economy needs: more production, less consumption on borrowed/printed money.

      People argue it's unfair to the poorest, the sales taxes are. Well, if you feel you are too poor to pay those taxes, you would have to file your income statement to prove that you do not have means to pay taxes and your taxes then can be returned to you. Instead what we do is we force everybody, including those who doesn't want to ask gov't for anything to waste their time and give up their Freedoms and file their income taxes, telling the gov't everything we do and letting the gov't decide how much it will let us keep of our money we earned, that's really turning people into slaves, taking away their ability to save and invest on their own, exercising authority over people's lives.

      --
      As to water supplies, again this is about class action lawsuit that can totally be filed on behalf of all the consumers of that water, not owners of that water, just consumers. There must be no liability caps and there must be personal responsibility. There are plenty of cases just like that one WITH gov't in power and supposedly taking care of this, but they are obviously not taking care of this because gov't can be lobbied and paid to give special privileges, which also destroys competition.

      Government involvement into economy is truly the root of all evil, people are still learning about this.

  25. Cease and desist! by Scott+Wood · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My point is precisely that there must be NO COMMONS.

    I am hereby giving notice that you have been discovered inhaling air, some of which was within the air rights of my property at the time that I bought it (it's your job to figure out whose air the wind blew toward you -- especially if you want to know whom to sue if it's polluted, and you can prove it was that specific breath that made you sick...).

    Further unauthorized use of this privately owned asset shall be grounds for litigation. I hope your lawyer's as good (i.e. expensive) as mine.

    I don't think a private owners would lobby to set a liability cap on damages caused by an oil spill in his private property

    The owners of the oil rig sure would. Do the owners of surrounding property have as much money to spend on lobbyists to represent their interests?

    1. Re:Cease and desist! by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      but you didn't buy the air on my property, and I am definitely not on it.

      More to the point, you are consuming as much air as I am (approximately), now if you are poisoning the air by some extra means and we had adjacent properties and your poisons entered my territory, I would be seeking retribution.

      As to 'lobbying', you are missing my point. I said already: there must be nothing that a company could lobby a gov't for in order to get any economic advantage. Think what I mean by that, think. It means a gov't that even you gave it money, couldn't help you to remove competition. You can lobby a gov't all you want, a gov't shouldn't be a force that changes outcomes in economies.

    2. Re:Cease and desist! by Scott+Wood · · Score: 1

      but you didn't buy the air on my property, and I am definitely not on it.

      The wind blew my air onto your property. Not *my* fault. Doesn't stop Monsanto from suing farmers when patented seed blows onto their farms.

      More to the point, you are consuming as much air as I am (approximately),

      You mean it's a common resource we all share, and nobody should own? :-)

      We probably consume about the same amount of air (depending on metabolism, activities, etc), but maybe I own more air than you. Maybe you don't own any air at all!

      now if you are poisoning the air by some extra means and we had adjacent properties and your poisons entered my territory, I would be seeking retribution.

      Prove that it's my dirty air that entered your property and not the polluter across the street.

    3. Re:Cease and desist! by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      You mean it's a common resource we all share, and nobody should own? :-)

      - it's hard to define which molecule is yours, but if your poisons enter my property, again as I said, I must be able to sue you and gov'ts only real purpose then must come into play: Justice system aimed at resolving contract and property rights. If poison was moved from your territory to mine by wind and you did nothing to prevent that, it is reasonable to sue you because we know how wind works and you can't ask for special treatment based on ignorance about movement of air.

      You are correct, it would be all about proving the fact, the question is: how is that different now? We must prove things are true before we can take any action. You can't do anything without some sort of a proof, so we'll have to find the source of the poison that you are releasing into the air, and this is absolutely the same kind of work, regardless whether it's gov't or private property.

    4. Re:Cease and desist! by Scott+Wood · · Score: 1

      The difference is with regulation we can try to manage risks beforehand, rather than just try to assign blame afterward -- and we don't need to worry who caused a specific harm. We can target activities which are known to be harmful in general, or which we don't know enough about and are too risky relative to their benefit.

      Obviously it's not perfect, but what you propose would be worse.

    5. Re:Cease and desist! by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      but that's another reason why we must NOT do regulations: nobody can predict all ways in which someone or something can be hurt. A gov't actually actively managing risk, that's first of all unheard of. Bernanke couldn't manage risk of falling off a chair, from 2005 straight to 2008 he was repeating the same thing: no bubble, it's just a temporary thing, everything is fine, prices for homes will stay up, all while setting low interest rates, creating more and more money, creating moral hazard with Freddie/Fannie, etc. Gov't can't manage risk of anything.

      Actually trying to prevent all bad things that can be done by all companies in the private sector, requires at least as much resources as the entire private sector. 50% gov't by mass that would take from the entire economy, I wonder how many days that structure would last.

      What I am proposing is much better from point of view of economy, that's first, and from point of view of actual outcomes for the environment, that's second.

      Economy, because there would be nothing to corrupt, no matter how much money a company was willing to spend.

      Environment, because actual owners of property are better at managing risks and costs and damage than somebody sitting in a gov't building somewhere, never caring about that property, because it's not theirs and at the same time being lobbied with millions of dollars to set liability caps, having actual sex with the industry representatives and snorting speed of a toaster.

  26. Talk about convenience... by IAD.Tatami · · Score: 1

    This would turn almost everyone I know into a felon. Convicted felons can't vote. Used to be, they didn't want poor people to vote. Now it looks like they're going to go after the intelligent and informed.

  27. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Rakarra · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Our PRIMARY export right now is "entertainment". The word is placed in quotations, because it is hardly entertaining to anyone with a lick of sense. Only the brainwashed, ignorant masses can actually PAY for the drivel pumped out from Hollywood and the music industries. I might consider paying them to STOP PRODUCING!

    Ah, another snob with poor taste who believes everything everyone else likes is crap, that he's somehow the enlightened one, and wishes with every fiber of his being that everyone else would just WAKE UP.

  28. Re:If it's in the treaty it will supersede U.S law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Unless it's flat-out unconstitutional (a much, much narrower standard than simply "illegal"), anything in this treaty will supersede U.S. courts and U.S. law.

    And this is why all the OTHER countries shouldn't be falling for all these super restrictive ACTA regulations. They seem to think that just because it gets passed, they'll be able to use all these things against americans that break the treaty when what will happen is: American companies will be able to force this shit in all other countries since they likely won't have some sort of rule to protect their citizens from the bad shit - yet the foreign companies will not be able to do jack shit to an american company that's doing the EXACT same thing to them since no laws can be made in the US to enforce those particular parts of ACTA due to it being unconstitutional.

    In short: The world is letting the US grab it by the balls.

  29. Repeat after me by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    We as citizens are so screwed.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  30. Re:Congratulations, Pirates by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh goody, scapegoating!

  31. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Informative

    Our PRIMARY export right now is "entertainment".

    No it isn't. Not by a long shot.
    The most recently available number for total hollywood studio revenues is $42.3 billion in 2007.
    Total US exports were a hair over $1 trillion in 2009.

    So even if every single cent hollywood made came from exports, they would still be a drop in the bucket.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  32. Re:nd if the y put into law by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 1

    I doubt it would.

    --
    "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
  33. Re:Congratulations, Media conglomerates by mjwx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You thought you should get paid for everything for forever and a day. But, you're like a parasite who thinks your host will continue to tolerate you forever. When the chickens come home to roost, you want to disavow blame. My finger is pointed squarely at you. This is your fault.

    There, fixed that for you.

    Remember who is really driving this, it's not about enforcing current copyrights at home, ACTA is about enforcing US copyright laws and indefinite copyright in other nations.

    --
    Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  34. WIFI MESH by cyclomedia · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Every time someone on slashdot posits a global wireless mesh they get beaten back because of how slow it'll be to transfer several gigs of porn over it. Last I checked the information that we need to know, to liberate from censorship, was basic text, heck a lot of it is currently representable in ASCII. So what if we step back a decade to the age of the text only bulletin board. At least these BBs will be automatically backed up, re-routed and physically located nowhere, so will be uncensorable.

    --
    If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
    1. Re:WIFI MESH by sexconker · · Score: 1

      At least these BBs will be automatically backed up, re-routed and physically located nowhere, so will be uncensorable.

      1: Everything is physically located somewhere. The "cloud" is bullshit.

      2: When you're goal is to distribute something such that it's in multiple locations (resilient), encrypted (deniable), anyone involved with the damned thing becomes a target.

      You can claim deniability, say "but I only had a HASH of HALF of it!" bullshit, and other childish "legal" arguments - they'll still take your ass down because they have the guns and you're a weak, poor, nerd.

  35. That won't matter by helios17 · · Score: 1

    there will be some sort of referendum which will see what the PEOPLE want Given the history of American Appellate courts overturning laws enacted by Prop 8 and Prop 25 in California, it won't matter a whit. The American Voter has always had the illusion of holding the power...that is until someone whispers in a Judges ear...

    --
    Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
  36. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The guy said "entertainment." That is not just hollywood movies. It's tv shows, sports (super bowl anyone?), music, and all the other stuff the entrainment industry uses to make slaves of us all, either by material that attempts to satisfy and please every possible personality that has ever existed, or, for those personalities who will not submit to it, by using the legal system to enforce and/or promote it. It's a lot bigger than a few billion, and much stronger that most realize.

    Perhaps when we are all in chains at the bottom of some mud pit, turning straw into bricks, we will look back with fondness to those golden "free years" as we wait for a moses to save us from ourselves and the reality we let happen.

  37. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 1

    The guy said "entertainment." That is not just hollywood movies. It's tv shows, sports (super bowl anyone?), music, and all the other stuff

    Hollywood is most movies, most tv shows and most music. Sports, I dunno I guess the NFL, et al are mostly independent.
    "All the other stuff" is what? Video games, books and magazines?

    Either way, it is unlikely that "entertainment" exports from all of those other sources bring the total to more than the total domestic and foreign revenue from 'just' Hollywood.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  38. I2P Freedom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Have you tried I2P? It's an encrypted anonymous network (since 2003) that is actually designed for 'sharing' large amounts of data at high speeds that depend more on your hardware than the network itself. (I've shared at least a few terabytes myself).

    It's different than TOR since it is an 'internal' style network, with only one 'out' connection to the actual internet. There are _no_ exit nodes or other 'trusted' people on the network. It has it's own websites (that people set up - you can too), bittorrent trackers (comes with a built-in anonymous bittorrent client, i2psnark), mail (which can be sent to regular internet sites like gmail), forums, and chat. More features are being added, and lots of people are using it and getting involved.

    So don't think it's just for sharing movies. I've gotten leaked docs and banned books, talked liberally with others on sensitive topics, and done a lot of other things that IMHO other people don't need to know. Privacy and freedom of access and speech are not simply privileges, they are "God given" rights. If those in power won't give it to us, then it is up to us to make it happen.

    Check it out (works on almost any system). Jump zone is here:

    Home page: http://www.i2p2.de/

    Downloads: https://www.i2p2.de/download