Proposed Final ACTA Text Published

ciaran_o_riordan writes "The US Trade Representative has published a text which, subject only to a last legal review, is proposed to be the final text of ACTA. The differences between this text and last month's, from the Tokyo round, are mostly cosmetic but there's an important positive change giving signatories the option of excluding patents from section 2. As for software patents, most harm has been avoided. If signatories make use of the section 2 exclusion option, there might be no harm at all. Lobbying for this will be important. Meanwhile, the many problems regarding Digital Restrictions Management, and the extra powers given to businesses to obtain personal and identifying information about accused copyright infringers "in the Digital Environment" are still there (mostly section 5). Earlier texts were much worse. The improvements in recent months are surely due to public outcry, leaving us indebted to the anonymous friends who scanned and leaked the various secret versions and the activists who made text versions and spread them across the Internet. There's a chance we can still influence the text in this legal review phase, but the bigger task ahead will be working on the national implementations. It's not yet clear what procedure the US will require for its own ratification."

Comments

Re:Copyrights?

[Obfuscant]

A lot more people would agree to abide by copyright laws if they had not been twisted into the lifetime + 50 years locks that they are now.

Citation needed.

I don't believe this. I doubt that the people who are passing around free copies of ripped movies would wait 14 years before doing so, and those who download them wouldn't either.

Just as a point of reference, for a movie that came out when you were 16, you'd need to wait until you were 30 to download a public domain copy legally, were copyright as short as just 14 years. Can anyone here who is 30 remember the movies they liked when they were 16, much less honestly say they'd wait until today to get a free copy of one?

Most people who support copyright violation claim that if only the prices for material were reasonable they'd not be violating copyright. Now you tell us if you only had to wait 14 years for material you'd not violate copyright law.