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WSJ Says Pro-ACTA Forces Helped Drive Anti-ACTA Reactions
pbahra writes with commentary from the Wall Street Journal: "Europeans will take to the streets this weekend in protest at the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international agreement that has given birth to an ocean full of red herrings. That so many have spawned is, say critics, in no small part down to the way in which this most controversial of international agreements was drawn up. If the negotiating parties had set out to stoke the flames of Internet paranoia they could not have done a better job. Accepted there are two things that should never be seen being made in public—laws and sausages—the ACTA process could be a case study of how not to do it. Conducted in secret, with little information shared except a few leaked documents, the ACTA talks were even decried by those who were involved in them."
Everyone is very keen on sharing until it is their stuff that is being shared.
I guess he has not heard of these people:
http://www.fsf.org/
Palm trees and 8
It's no wonder they had to do this in secret, giving companies the right to dictate to goverments is bad no matter which way you look t it
If anybody has any bad feelings towards Wikileaks, let the ACTA serve as a reminder that the only reason we even know of it is because somebody on the inside provided it and Wikileaks released it.
So human life that is damaged from taking a counterfeit drug is worth less than what rights holders lose due to piracy? Or did I just interpret that wrong?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
'laws and sausages' is attributed to von Bismarck. Is it not the case that every RFC is basically an international trade agreement? The process of making them is very different than ACTA. Which produces the more effective result?
Actually, our local farmers do tend to let people watch their sausages being made (hint: Wessex possibly has the world's best pigs, and most local farmers seem to make foodie sausages ). Laws and sausages should be made in public.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If more people would share my company's software. So long as they know where to find us when the users discover they need training and the management realises they need consulting to make use of what they are now finding out, because these are the hard things.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Obvious rhetoric being obvious.
If making a law is so dirty, it's about time it makes the show.
>Accepted there are two things that should never be seen being made in public
I've never heard this before. Who's accepted this?
The old adage is about how you might not want to know how sausages and laws are made; it has nothing to do with making them in public. In fact, that's rather contrary to the premise of the rest of the post.
As unpleasant as it may be to watch the process, laws and sausages are precisely the kinds of things you DO want to be made in public, so you can see just exactly what goes into them.
n/t
But proclaiming persecution fears are merely paranoia is a good way to ensure that your persecution is not resisted...
There is an underlying problem: our model of intellectual property simply doesn't make sense for the real world, and more importantly, this is obvious to nearly everyone, and is at odds with how we actually use digital information. The deeper issue is that this starts to bring into question models of property. We have always had artificial scarcity layered on actual scarcity, as a sort of exaggeration. That works when the disparity between actual and apparent scarcity is not too great. But it's obvious to most people that scarcity in copying digital media is wholly artificial. Pushing too hard may lead to people asking questions the WSJ would rather they didn't ask.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig.
No matter how you went about pushing ACTA, people would have been upset. It was kept secretly because big content companies were hoping that it would be passed before anybody realized it was happening.
ACTA could not be passed in most places with a fully informed public & electorate.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
is ACTA.
I have a hard enough time getting intelligent, driven and aware folks to call their congress folks.
Good on them for actually taking it to the streets.
Check your premises.
if people would stop using the subject as part of the message body. It's not, it's a totally separate field (for a reason)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
with it.
too.
do I
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
in the first place.
oh I did it didn't I
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
agree
At least
It's supposed to be a summary of what the full message contains. Not the first half of the first sentence.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
I think when you parallel the statement in the headline with my headline I think the point is more clear.
Don't read this the wrong way: making laws should be transparent. I know at the local level, when bills are debated, there is always some crackpot who likes to take their 2-6 minutes to talk about something completely unrelated to the bill. This takes up valuable time but they really can't be stopped. The local reps don't want to do anything about it because the crackpot is usually homeless or elderly or otherwise infirmed. The point is that the local council will often do closed door meetings to get work done. (Let's move pass the fact that these reps don't have the backbone to actually ban the crackpot from speaking unless relevant to the bill at hand.)
I know that Congress doesn't work the same way (e.g. there are no public hearings where I can testify) but they do tend to have more closed door meetings than should be allowed. Furthermore, the notes/transcripts from these meetings are usually not made public (or if they are, it's impossible to find).
There are times when closed door meetings are necessary for progress. It sucks but it happens. But unless directly related to national security, transcripts should always be available to the People.
Saying it should happen and it actually happening are, at the moment, two totally different things separated by a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon. But one can dream...
We don't live in Shouldland.
The reaction from people who say this is a bad thing, it is not that ACTA is a bad thing, they are reacting to a notion that what they are doing is wrong.
"Wrong" by whose standards?
And apparently anyone who opposes the ACTA is automatically someone who infringes upon copyright themselves. He seems to be a fan of generalizations and irrelevancy.
If you say copying other people’s copyright is an OK thing to do, then you are saying that theft is OK.
No, not really. Not the "theft" part at least. Not "theft" as most people likely know it. I guess "theft" means "copying" now. Sure, I feel that kind of "theft" is okay. Kind of redundant to restate that fact, though, isn't it?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
in almost 99% of cases.
And why the HELL should anyone care if you don't like it?
I don't like cold rice pudding.
I'm not going to demand nobody eats it, though.
Pretentious asshole.
This allows readers to skip over messages they are not interested in, and use their time more efficiently.
It's not about what I prefer, it's about efficient communication.
To follow your pointless analogy, it would be like not labeling containers of cold rice pudding (or labeling them as something else), forcing everyone else to waste their time checking to see what's actually in the container.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
How about "The Real House Members of Washington, D.C."?
but they have so convoluted the process that its impossible to follow what they are doing. Worse they now like to pass laws where the actions are decided by groups not yet formed thereby circumventing the action, penalty, and enforcement, parts of many laws.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...if you use dots.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
in almost 99% of cases.
And why the HELL should anyone care if you don't like it?
I don't like cold rice pudding.
I'm not going to demand nobody eats it, though.
Pretentious asshole.
I doubt he is pretentious.
It would be acceptable to do the initial iterations in secret so long as the final version has a long period of public review before the vote.
Some groups have tried to fast-track laws specifically to get them passed before the public has time to oppose them, specifically because they *know* the laws are harmful to the majority of the people impacted. People are reacting against this obviously hostile attitude, and demanding more openness because of it.
Short summaries seem to work pretty well as newspaper headlines; they just need a little thought in ensuring they capture the essence of the subject and catch the right eyes
As does.
Free Martian Whores!
We're going to protest on Saturday, in Helsinki, in spite of the cold. I hope that there would be at least about a hundred people, but I might be pleasantly surprised.
At any rate, I'll be there: one day my son could ask me what did I do while they were trying to silence the internet - and I don't want to have to say that I was just sitting around. Even if it's a lost battle, I owe it to him.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
too!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
it can get confusing when many people reply to the same post and you end up with a bunch of subject lines that all just say Re: X.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
...ellipsis.
Isn't it in self intrest that SOMEONE censor the internet. It doesn't matter who censors the internet, especially if they are the same people they buy PR from. Even if it wasn't they have plenty of money to buy a single source off.
Again, this comes as angst against wall street is at an all time high. they recovered from the recession on government funded dollars, while the common Joe struggles.
A new wave of protests might stiffle that.
So, yet again, I go, rice pudding is INTENDED to be eaten hot. Therefore NOBODY SHOULD EVER EAT IT COLD.
Or, in other words, if you don't like it, don't do it.
Nuking them? I'm pretty sure RIAA and MPAA can be seen as weapons of mass destruction.
The cost to manufacture the "pill" is only one of the costs of producing the "pill" (or "recording", software or anything that has a great deal of IP inside it).
I speak as one who used to develop a product whose product development costs per product were at least a dozen times the cost of manufacturing. The regulatory costs were about 5 times the product manufacturing costs. The support costs were equal to the costs of manufacturing. And we haven't gotten into the administrative, marketing, distribution, user education or other overhead costs.
Now why would I embark on a 12 year development cycle (typical for new "pills") before I produce my first product if on day one you are free to duplicate my product and begin selling at a priced based only on manufacturing costs and not incurring the development and regulatory approval costs? Where is my incentive to invest? Who will pay the researchers? You don't seem to be willing to.
So, IMHO, the "I want it now and I want it cheap and damn the IP" notion leads to less development.
I think I rather want that development encouraged as when I was diagnosed, the multi-million $ machine to treat me was available because some company had paid people over several years to develop it. My wife is taking a $20k/year drug without which she couldn't walk around the grocery store..someone paid for that development. And I want the results of the next risking of investment funds to try and develop the next "pill" I need. And the next song, the next app, the next...but you get the idea.
I note a posting today of someone lamenting the lack of good jobs in free software. Maybe there is some connection between corporate income and jobs?
(Not saying all prices are justified or all corporations are ethical. Just you can't have something for nothing and expect it to be there for you for long.)
The fact that the subject line isn't generally very useful is exactly what causes problems when you use it for something else. If the subject was usually useful then everyone would read it, followed by the message, and together they would make sense. But the subject isn't usually useful, so I don't usually read it and if it does contain something useful then chances are I've missed it.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
SOPA protects the middleman - publisher/distributors of artist's content in doing so artists receive a fraction of the $$$ --- bulk goes to the multinational middleman (Apple) Artists need to sell directly to consumers - still getting pennys per sale yet with prices so low piracy would be less of an issue - people would pay pennys legally
ha
... Three dots and you're out (of the subject).
Of course they don't have your best interests at heart. As part of a democracy, they're supposed to have everybody's best interests at heart. That includes the carpenters working on the movie sets that lose funding if the studio collapses.
If the studio collapses, I have no problems with them losing funding, since it means they weren't very good carpenters in the first place. Send those guys to work at McDonalds, and hire better carpenters whose work won't collapse.
-- Terry
... you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Democracies have practical implementation problems, so the would-be democracies become some sort of representative republic instead.
And, over time, they devolve into simple oligarchies.
Inasmuch as wealth is the ability to influence others to do your bidding, and inasmuch as such influence is the bread and butter of politics, ALL governments become fascist over time.
Accepted there are two things that should never be seen being made in public—laws and sausages—the ACTA process could be a case study of how not to do it. Conducted in secret, with little information shared except a few leaked documents, the ACTA talks were even decried by those who were involved in them.
I dont get it. The author of the article provides little snippets of text that appear to contradict themselves. Above he says that laws should be made in private and ACTA didnt do it right. And then the next sentence it says that ACTA was developed in near perfect secrecy. So
If you say copying other people’s copyright is an OK thing to do, then you are saying that theft is OK.
No! I am not saying this. Yes, theft is wrong. Stop implying that just because I choose to see sharing and copying as having incredible value, that I want to start stealing from someone. Instead, the opposite is true... a limited set of corporate distributors would prefer to have no open sharing and copying at all unless it is provided through a limited set of channels under their control. Sharing and copying is not the same as distribution and broadcasting. Owners of IP content deserve control distribution and broadcasting of the content they own... I have no problem with this, and if ACTA really provided that without infringing on the rights of everyone else to share, distribute and broadcast alternate content, I would have no problems with it.
Everyone is very keen on sharing until it is their stuff that is being shared.
Incorrect. There is now masses of content that is entirely free to re-share, re-copy, re-distribute, re-broadcast outside the control of any corporate distributor and all WITH THE BLESSING of the artist (IP holder). Primarily this content uses the Creative Commons License and can be found at many sites (ex: youtube.com, jamendo.com, vimeo.com, etc). Some of it even used to exist on megaupload.com but these are the sad casualties of the apparent fight to retain the rights of some.
The sad reality for distribution and IP controllers is that their cost of doing business is quickly approaching $0. It used to cost money to print media, ship it to stores, hold it on shelves, sell it to customers, market it on TV, radio or print. But now all that costs about nothing. In fact, the consumer now pays the majority of distribution costs to their ISP. Combine that with the fact that new content is being generated at an incredible rate and they can no longer limit the supply of consumable entertainment. There is less and less reason for an artist to use their services or provide them with a large share of the profits. The distribution companies are about to die. They are like the newspapers and magazines. They are the phone book companies and the book publishers. They need to adapt or die. The simple solution is for them to look forward and begin reducing prices and increase access to their content. Instead they are choosing to do the opposite and they will suffer in the long term. These laws are important to them, because if they are achieved it means that the distribution companies will hinder advancement into the future and they will have little incentive to change. I dont believe in protecting the past at the detriment of progress.
I do not support piracy AND I do not support suppressing alternative options for distribution. Sharing is godly, in that it allows humans to express humanity.
The east europeans are showing how it is done. ACTA can be beaten by determined resistance.
Korma: Good