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'Son of ACTA' Worse Than Original
An anonymous reader writes "TechDirt has the latest on the leaked US proposals for the 'Son of ACTA' treaty and it looks worse than the original. It's practically a checklist for how to kill innovation while making lawyers rich. In particular, they call for expanding what's patentable, blocking people from buying copyrighted goods in other countries and taking them home, expanding liability for ISPs whose users commit acts of infringement, forcing ISPs to identify their users to anyone on demand, and getting rid of third-party patent review while expanding the presumption that they're valid. The only way it could get any worse would be if it were enacted in law."
The reason is that these things being proposed are actually ANTI-capitalist.
You're thinking too idealistically. The capitalist philosophy inevitably leads to crony capitalism. You need a philosophy centred around something other than rational selfishness and regulated accordingly.
Social democracy is an obvious answer, and has worked quite well in Europe in the sense that it gives people a good quality of life rather than in the sense of economic summary statistics suggesting that a country is doing well.
Degrees of socialism - in the sense of worker control of the means of production managed by a sympathetic state - helped much of Europe emerge from WW2 on both sides of the Curtain. Soviet Russia was throroughly successful for most of its life, being America's only equal for most of the last century. The response to resource allocation difficulties which had emerged by the early '80s was to dismantle the socialist framework and waste money on Reagan's arms race - this wasn't the only option. The West has just had a far greater hit to its economy and we didn't respond by entirely abandoning free market principles: we have just temporarily "socialised" elements of banking and industry.
As for communism in the sense defined by Marx, it's never been reached. There are lots of successful independent worker cooperatives - the John Lewis Partnership being one of the most famous in the UK - which give some idea of what worker control of the means of production without state management looks like.
The point being that there are lots of alternatives to a capitalist philosophy, many features of which are currently in use.
Article 4, paragraph 3:
Each Party shall provide to authors, performers, and producers of phonograms the right to authorize or prohibit the making available to the public of the original and copies of their works, performances, and phonograms through sale or other transfer of ownership.
I'm not sure what this means, exactly, but it sounds like they don't want to let you resale things? Correct me if I'm wrong.