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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."
The U.S. Senate simply needs to not ratify it.
Right?
expandfairuse.org
Remember, the original goal of copyright was to give exclusive copy rights to the authors for a limited period in exchange for their work to become public domain after that limited period.
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.
acta proceedings were prepared during bush years, with republican senate and house. it was well underway in 2006 when democrats got the houses. and it was already being negotiated in 2008. not that it would matter much, since democrats are too in the pockets of the private interests. but, the head of the snake, were republicans.
they shaped this.
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Big business may be corrupting the elected representatives, but the blame still lands at the feet of the voters who keep voting the same people back into office.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
big business is not corrupting elected representatives. big business is making sure that their candidate gets elected, through the mechanics of capitalist system.
big business owns big media. big business has big bucks to spend. even if your candidate has money to spend, if big business owning the big media doesnt want him to get elected, they wont just give airtime to him/her in their media outlets. and, your candidate wont win.
its as simple as that.
that is of course leaving aside the fact that big business can easily brainwash entire swaths of society, or, outright lie to them, if need be, through their media.
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Part of the cause of that is the lack of proportional representation, though. So people get stuck in the whole "Go ahead, throw your vote away" dilemma.
They end up voting for the lesser of two corporate ruled evils, as opposed to a party that is more in line with what they actually want.
Well, that coupled with People believing myths due to either propaganda or outright stupidity (ie. republicans being for small govn't, which is patently false these days; or that dems are going to implement any sort of democratic social reform... maybe token measure here and there, but it's still by the corps, for the corps.)
Being an outsider looking in, the whole setup looks like sheer lunacy to me, but...
Sent from my PDP-11
Your rant would make more sense if you demonstrated any knowledge of the legal ways that a treaty becomes law in the U.S.. In the U.S., the house of representatives have nothing to do with treaties. Treaties must be ratified by the Senate.Furthermore, it hasn't been that many years since a President signed a treaty that was resoundingly rejected by the U.S. Senate. Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Accords and the U.S. Senate voted 98-0 to reject them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
vast swaths of the society do not have the means and the time to work on a high level of political awareness through culture and digesting heaps of information. they have to survive, they have to take care of their family.
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If you didn't vote Republican in 2008, you asked for this.
I've found that...
If you voted you asked for this.
If you didn't vote you are responsible for letting it happen.
is true of about 2/3rds of what the governement does... if not more.
they have to survive, they have to take care of their Farmville.
FTFY.
OK, not universally true, but true to an extent that pretty much guarantees the success of...OOH SHINY!
"Panem et circenses." Our culture surely has the "circenses" part down pat.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I voted Independent in 2000.
In Florida.
My bad.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Aww, isn't that cute? The little AC still thinks he has a major party looking out for his interests!
Your brain is not a computer.
". . . until signed away, by Executive Agreement, despite the will of the people."
Uh, the people never really had much power (which, as we see here, was a mistake). The government is making this already bad situation worse, yes, but it was always broken.
If the people really wanted to, they could overthrow the government using their sheer numbers, but too many people are preoccupied with their unimportant little activities to care about things such as freedom and privacy, leaving people who would actually do something if the situation presented itself outnumbered.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Both the major parties are looking out for his interests, in the hope that they can appropriate any that he has left.
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Earlier texts were much worse.
Stalin: Let's execute all dissidents and paint the Mausoleum green!
Minister: Why green, comrade Stalin?
Stalin: I knew there would be no objections about the first part.
Poor, poor excuse. It doesn't take that long to realize that they are ruled mostly by the rich and by people who couldn't care less about them except for their vote. It's just that the average person is so indoctrinated that they think they're making a difference with their pointless little votes for the same two parties over and over.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The treaty spends a lot of time on "pirated copyright goods", and the bits about "counterfeit trademark goods" seem tacked on. I could find no mention of the public good, the rights of licensees, fair use, public domain, media transfer/backup copies, etc. There is a good bit about the minimum civil and criminal procedures and penalties that should be in place and made available to businesses and rights holders. It seems to be exclusively intended to ensure that organizations like the RIAA can sue and harass "pirates", and god willing, get them a healthy jail sentence too. This is interesting in that it might provide some cover for rights-holder actions that are an abuse of the court system (mass filings) and criminal harassment.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Part of the cause of that is the lack of proportional representation, though.
No, the biggest problem is the power and size of government. Even with parliamentary systems with proportional representation major parties can be forced to include small and evil parties to form a governing coalition. Witness Israel, whenever the government holds serious talks with Palestinians it has to deal with small ultra conservative Jewish parties who oppose giving Palestinians any land. That is what happened in the talks that came closest to peace, the Taba Summit or talks. In 1999 Israel's PM Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat came the closest to peace in Taba, Egypt. Running against Ariel the Bulldozer Sharon, who had the support of those ultra conservative parties, to become the PM for another term Barak didn't finish negotiations. And of course Sharon opposed them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Like any short term contractor, a politician has to use at least part of the time while they're in their current position to line up their next position.
Once you get a contract which is paid a fixed rate no matter what your performance, it doesn't make too much difference what you do during that time. In a contractor position where your job is mostly about "networking" not networking, but "networking", in reality, as long as your talking with your friends and bitching about your enemies, you are in fact doing your job.
So, while you have this 2-6 year contract, you have the perfect opportunity to find what's next. Treat busting a teenager with coca chewing gum from Columbia as a major drug crime, advocate the need for coca chewing gum detectors in the airports and you can get an officer position at a security firm lined up with a limo and personal driver when you're done with your current job.
It makes no difference if you're democrat or republican. They're both so full of shit that they had to paint their offices brown so as not to worry about the splatter marks when they hit their desks in exclamation (while yelling at the inanimate object displaying the broadcast of a modern alternative to the Greek arenas).
The real bitch of it is, as the house grows, it becomes easier and easier for a politician to spend all their time on their next job because they can easily be lost in the crowd.
this way or the other, that is what you have, and have to work with. you cannot just allow private interests dominate every aspect of life, brainwash citizens, and just say that 'well, they should have been smart'. they may be going for 'oooh shinies', but, they are still people, and they have a right to not be dominated, fooled, frauded and oppressed.
if the good people dont act, evil has the day.
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