Stop Being Poor: U.S. Piracy Watch List Hits a New Low With 2012 Report

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Trade Representative released its annual Special 301 Report yesterday, unsurprisingly including Canada on the Priority Watch list. While inclusion on the list is designed to generate embarrassment on target countries, Michael Geist explains why this year's report should elicit outrage. Not only is the report lacking in objective analysis, it targets some of the world's poorest countries with no evidence of legal inadequacies and picks fights with any country that dare adopt a contrary view on intellectual property issues."

Comments

Disappointment

[danaris]

From where I sit, this has been one of the greatest disappointments even staunch supporters like me have with Obama: his administration's continued support for the content industry at the expense of people in America and around the world.

Dan Aris

For once I disagree with Michael Geist..

[Sir_Sri]

I don't think we (as canadians) should be outraged. That's the wrong approach to this. We should be celebrating the fact that we have better rules than the americans.

Imagine some politicians came out with a report about how awful it is that blacks can vote in this long list of countries, or how abhorrent is is that women could vote in some places, or how some countries *still* haven't enacted prohibition, or how terrible it must be for people living in those countries that have government healthcare. If you on one of those lists you don't get outraged, you can use it as proof positive that your system is working, and those idiots that wrote the report are living in the wrong century. Which, as with this report, they are.

There's no point in trying to complain that some of their metrics are wrong or unfairly target the wrong groups. The whole concept is basically inverted, squabbling about the details gives the false impression that it can somehow be corrected with some tweaking of specifics.