If a consumer buys a CD, they are actually buying the CD -- the whole "licensed, not sold" thing that happens with computer software does not generally happen with music CDs.
A CD burner is not a circumvention device. See 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2).
I don't know where you get the "copying one CD gets you sent to federal prison" idea. Under 17 U.S.C. 506, at minimum you need to have some financial gain or commercial interest.
And, distributing that cell phone photo is NOT a crime, because the photo itself (as set up in the original article) is NOT an infringement -- it's a fair use. Sure, you could be charged, but the threshold for being charged for any thing is pretty low.
Typically, counter claims will be heard at the same time as the original suit. And, the request for attorney's fees is just made in a motion at the end of the case. It's in the judge's discretion to award them, but it's certainly not a long drawn out process.
even if you win you will be liable for court fees and it is terribly unlikely that you will win because fair use doctrine is extremely hard to prove. First of all, if you win, the other side generally pays costs. But, court fees aren't that high -- the big cost is attorney's fees, which includes stuff like depositions and so on. Luckily, a judge can award attorneys fees in copyright cases, which they commonly do when its a big guy v. a little guy and the little guy wins.
Fair use isn't particularly hard to prove if you have a good case. The nuisance is that the outer boundaries of fair use are unclear. Some things clearly are fair use (parody or minor incidental copying) and some aren't (wholesale copying and distributing of movies, for example).
Assault is basically "improper touching" That's battery.
And copyright violation now includes criminal penalties, unlike all other contract violations. Copyright violation doesn't have anything to do with contract. And, you don't have to worry about criminal violation for stuff like "accidentally taking a cell phone photo of artwork."
The fact is that a certain segment of the population is aggressively exploiting copyright laws, in order to control markets and sue people for large sums of money. True, but there's very little overlap between the scenario in the article and the things that people actually sue for today. 99.9% of copyright infringement suits today are for acts of wholesale infringement of recent commercial works -- stuff like copying of music and movies. I'm unaware of any proposal for copyright reform which would allow me to, say, copy a DVD of a recent movie, give the copy to a friend, and keep the original for myself.
Here are some reforms that I think should be made: 1. Shorten copyright term. I find it had to believe that a 90-year term provides any incentive to create than a 50-year term 2. Better define fair use. Especially in documentary filmmaking, there is a lot of over-protection, where a filmmaker will clear the rights to things that, reasonably, he was using fairly 3. Incidental copies made during playing or viewing of a work should be statutorily non-infringing 4. institute "Personal Use," allowing you to space-shift your music, make backup copies and so on
The example has a number of things which either (1) are fair uses, (2) aren't infringements at all or (3) aren't subject to copyright at all.
For example, the cell phone snapshot that happened to capture a copyright picture in the background -- that's clearly fair use. Displaying your tattoo in public doesn't make it a "public display." The forwarded emails are probably subject to an implied license and, even if they weren't, they may not contain sufficient creative expression to be copyrightable. The rough drawing of an architectural building is not an infringement (see 17 U.S.C. 120(a)). Reading the e.e. cummings poem is probably also fair use, especially if each student has a textbook containing the poem.
Copyright law is generally *civil*, not criminal. In general, this means that a lot of wrongs are ignored by potential plaintiffs, just as a matter of tradition, convenience and politeness, just as they are with a lot of other civil wrongs -- nuisance, trespass, assault** (especially among children), etc..... Nobody goes around saying "Look at how many acts of trespass you committed today. We need to fix trespass law."
[Note: I agree that copyright law needs some reforms; the repeal of Sonny Bono would be a great start. I just don't find this example to be very persuasive.}
The problem though is that the BSA's standards can catch even companies that are completely above-board, but haven't kept their receipts. The BSA's claim is that "If you don't have your receipt for this software, then it's pirated."
Now, whether that would stand up in court is a separate question. It seems to me that if you have a retail box for every piece of software, that should be good enough to convince a jury. Of course, the cynic says that the BSA is going after small companies because they're much less likely to fight, so what a jury would think isn't really an issue.
Of course, if you have a shopping-cart ordering model, then it's not a one-click buy.
Let's break that down with some specifics:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising; 1) a web browser 2) a web page about an item 3) where pushing "buy now" causes the web browser to send a "buy this item now" message to a web server 4) a web server 5) receives te request 6) looks up the purchaser's credit card number 7) creates an order for that purchaser in the order processing system which... 8) Processes the order 9) all without a shopping cart
I suggest that the only potentially novel thing here is #3. And, I suggest that #3 is obvious -- the only reason that nobody was doing it before hand was that nobody had previously considered the problem of reducing the number of clicks it takes to get somebody to buy something.
You're right that there's nothing stopping Verizon from out-bidding all the other providers just to prevent competition by letting the spectrum sit idle. Well, nothing except $4.6B. Verizon is only going to do that if it thinks that, by doing so, its subscribers will give it $4.6B more than they otherwise would have.
And, now, that's going to be really difficult since Verizon is paying the price of locking out new competition, but AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, SunComm & the rest all receive the benefits of that lockout. That's hardly a great competitive position for Verizon.
As far as the "resource that should belong to everybody" thing goes, check out the "Tragedy of the Commons" in Wikipedia. Things that are owned by everybody are invariably overused, which drives down the total benefit. Granting a property right in that thing, which happens on the auction, is a common solution to the problem.
Well, that's the cynical view. The even more cynical view is that if they didn't get the revenue from the auction, they'd just raise my taxes even higher.
I propose a better alternative: just give it away in a lottery, but let the lottery winner sell the spectrum to whoever they want. The net effect would be about the same (unless you end up with some kooky winner who's unwilling to accept $4.6 billion), but the lottery winner would get the revenue, not the gov't.
If you have some proof that the carriers are coordinating their prices with each other, I'd love to see it. Horizontal price maintenance is a huge antitrust violation.
Watch out, though -- you can't use the fact that they all price the same, since that would also happen in a market without price maintenance. This is true even when prices go up -- it appears that people do not buy mobile phone service because of SMS message pricing. (BTW... I can buy unlimited messages for about an additional $10/month.)
They are not operating on radio spectrum that belongs to everybody. They're operating on radio spectrum that they bought at auction. Spectrum hasn't belonged to everybody in a long time -- pick your favorite local radio station and try broadcasting your own signal on the same frequency if you don't believe me. The only thing that's changed is how the government decides who gets it.
Now, I'm all for new entrants; I hope Google really shakes things up a lot. But, if they get outbid, it'll be because their model won't offer things that are as valuable to consumers as the high bidder.
Why not? The more who participate, the higher the price paid -- spectrum auctions offset my taxes.
Plus, if Verizon thinks it can out-bid Google and do something with the spectrum that its customers will be willing to pay more than $4.6B for, that's a good thing. If they turn out to be wrong and somebody else can, than Verizon's best bet is to sell the spectrum to that other company.
We're not talking about discussing a work; doing so doesn't implicate any of the copyright holder's Section 106 rights. So, you're right -- copyright doesn't come into that. But, that's not what we're talking about.
The fact that an infringing activity makes a work more known or increases its sales DOES NOT make it non-infringing. A movie producer, for example, must still get permission from a book's author before turning it into a movie, even if the movie would increase sales of the book.
As far as the rest of your comment goes, how old are you, 12? I've already given an example of a "fact about a work" that infringes on that work: "the text of Harry Potter is as follows: . .." The only question is where the line is drawn between that statement and the statement "Dumbledore dies in book 6"? You'd do better addressing the merits of what I'm saying than just asserting that I'm "Wronf."
I think I said "You cannot copyright facts." So, no real argument there. But, I think that this is really the wrong way to analyze the current problem. In general, the idea about facts not being protected doesn't really apply to facts about a protected work. Facts contained in the work are unprotected, but facts *about* the work, depending on their expressiveness may be.
There is a popular, but unfortunately incorrect, belief that in order to infringe a book, you actually have to copy text from the book. In fact, the creative expression protected by copyright is deeper than the text itself. For example, in some circumstances, a character can be an appropriate subject of copyright. So, anybody who writes a book starring a 13-year-old orphaned student at an elite English school for wizards who happens to have a lightning-bolt shaped scar over his eye, given to him by his arch-nemesis when he was a baby, may very well be infringing the Harry Potter character, even if this other student were named "John Smith." The more similar John Smith is to Harry Potter, the more likely the infringement.
The difference is the "idea-expression" dichotomy -- ideas are not subject to copyright; you can only copyright your expression of those ideas. And, unfortunately, the line between the two is blurry, although there are things which are clearly on either side of that line.
I suggest that the better way to think about Dumbledore's death is to ignore the factual question and ask whether it's an idea or expression. I would argue that the death of the main character's mentor is really just an idea and thus, is not protected.
There's a distinction in copyright law between creative expression and factual information. You can copyright creative expression, you cannot copyright facts. And, you can only be held liable for infringing the creative expression, not the underlying facts.
You can't get around copying somebody's creative expression by calling it "a fact about their creative expression." The most obvious example of this is "the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is as follow . . . " You may technically be making a factual statement, but it would still be infringing since you're copying the creative expression.
It may be ridiculous, but that's approximately the legal theory used. If a person in the US refuses to work under a personal service contract, the other party cannot force them to do so. Now, that other party may have other remedies. For example, the worker may be prevented from doing the same work for somebody else (especially a competitor), or he may have to pay damages.
This is the main reason why athletes can "renegotiate" their contracts in the middle of the contract term -- if the team doesn't agree to renegotiate, the athlete just refuses to work. And, because the team's losses during his absence are pretty speculative, the athlete usually won't have to pay any damages. In fact, the only real leverage that the team has is that he won't be able to work for any other team during the term of his original contract.
Even if there was a 2-week statement in your contract, it's unenforceable. THe US gave up on the idea of involuntary servitude about 150 years ago. (Military service is an exception....)
Lest somebody take you at face value, you're just being cynical -- the statute does not differentiate. A corporation can also be found liable for $150,000 per infringement and an individual can be found liable for $750.
Well, in theory at least, they will never be told that they can pollute. What happens is that the community will say "We have an environmental reason to keep X out," and X may say "No you don't. Your claimed environmental reason is completely bogus. You just want to keep us out of your market." The tribunal's job, then, is to decide whether the environmental concern is actually completely bogus or not.
The end effect of this is to shift the ability to make decisions about which claimed environmental reasons are bogus away from state and local government and into a NAFTA tribunal. And, the NAFTA tribunal is (presumably) a lot harder to lobby. The NAFTA tribunal, however, is not the end word -- there's an appeals process, and (if it's a serious enough issue), the U.S. could just refuse to comply. The problem with the California example is that it shows that the process is working as intended.
The text of Chapter 11 is at http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/NAFTA/chap-111.asp. It's absolutely horribly written, but my read says that, basically, you can't treat foreigners differently than you treat your own citizens. Where I think most people get angry at chapter 11 is that it prevents a lot of thing that countries would do to protect their own industries. Now, often, that happens circuitously by raising environmental concerns about the foreign entrant. But, environmental concerns are often real, so Article 1114 has a huge carve-out that allows countries to establish actual environmental standards.
I'm not too worried by a case where somebody wanted to pollute, complained under NAFTA, and was told that, indeed, they could not pollute. That's a bit like saying "If Charles Manson had won his murder case, he would have killed more people. Therefore, the process that allowed Manson to have a trial (instead of just being sent straight to jail without one), is bad." The only way Methanex could have won was if there's no scientific basis for banning MTBE, only a basis based on keeping out foreign competition.
There are two real NAFTA questions:
(1) Are the parties to NAFTA better off with it than without it? I think the answer to this is clearly yes -- trade among the parties has increased enormously, which means that consumers in each country have a better selection of goods & prices than they did before NAFTA.
(2) How do you (or do you) compensate the losers under NAFTA? E.g., the Mexican corn farmers driven out of business by US corn producers, U.S. employees at clothing companies who can't compete with their lower-priced Mexican competition, etc....
Well, my source was Science -- that article, I think, actually came from the Washington Post. I think that the most obvious evidence that organic farming doesn't yield as much as conventional farming is that if it did, agribusiness would be all organic.
I don't doubt that Mexico has its own losers under NAFTA, as does the U.S. does also. It's a little like Walmart coming to a community -- everybody's buying power shoots up a bit, except for the people who Walmart drives out of business. And, those people are always the ones fighting new Walmarts.
Note, for example, that while Mexican corn farmers are going out of business, Mexican Avacado farmers are doing well. Mexico's total exports to the US have more than doubled since NAFTA.
As far as your belief that subsidizing the production of food somehow yields starvation, I'd be curious to see some scientific backup for that. To me, the idea that Mexicans are somehow worse off because they can buy food cheaper, and thus keep more of their own money, seems just bizarre. As for those farmers, they should switch crops -- they don't need to be cheaper than the US; they just need a comparative advantage.
Actually, at the moment, the big problem seems to be the diversion of corn to the manufacture of ethanol. Because of a screwy tax credit for ethanol production, corn prices have gone up dramatically, on both sides of the border. (I say screwy because the amount of energy you get out of corn-based ethanol is only marginally higher than they amount you put into making it. Converting sugar, on the other hand, is much more efficient.)
After hybrids, the next version of genetic modification, decades ago, involved irradiating the seeds, planting them and seeing what grew. When one of the plants grown from irradiated seeds produced a better crop, they saved the seeds from that plant, grew others, and sold the seeds. The same thing happens in nature, albeit on a much slower time frame. GM crops are just a way of being more selective about what you end up growing. How do you know that the corn plant your corn came from wasn't hit by cosmic radiation, changing some random gene? (Chances are, you've eaten many plants with some random genetic differences.)
How many generations of testing did people do on, say, broccoli, before deciding it was safe? There are probably over 1,000 varieties of tomatoes -- some were found growing naturally, others produced by irradiation, others by selective breeding and so on, with more coming out every year. How many of those varieties have had any sort of extensive testing? Ever picked wild berries? How did you know that the particular variety wasn't toxic somehow?
Genetic modifications allow foods to store longer, avoid insects and disease, withstand shipping, provide more nutrients and be more tasty (typically not all at the same time). This means that we can eat strawberries in the middle of the winter, eat tastier corn in the summer and provide more nutritious soybean plants to third-world countries. It means that farmers get better yields, throw less food away, and can thus reduce prices. Lower prices mean fewer people starving, and more savings. It's a good thing.
Not scamming their customers, just everybody else. It's hard to reconcile the view of an 'honest person who happens to be engaged in something illegal' with identity theft, credit-card fraud and denial-of-service attacks.
I agree that *most people* would. But, some wouldn't. And, there are cases were most people would not -- what happens if, say, it was copied into something that your father wouldn't agree with. Maybe he was a staunch Democrat and his painting was being used by a Republican presidential candidate.
Sometimes economic harm is just hard to quantify. For example, if GM copies a Ford advertisement. What's the economic harm to Ford? How do you know?
There is another possible type of harm -- the harm to the right to be able to control how an author's work is used. While US law protects such rights less than many other countries, the concept is still in the background of things like Section 106A, the derivative work right and statutory damages.
There is a good argument that copyright damages should be limited solely to actual economic damages. But, that would dramatically cut back on the protection provided by US copyright law.
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If a consumer buys a CD, they are actually buying the CD -- the whole "licensed, not sold" thing that happens with computer software does not generally happen with music CDs.
A CD burner is not a circumvention device. See 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2).
I don't know where you get the "copying one CD gets you sent to federal prison" idea. Under 17 U.S.C. 506, at minimum you need to have some financial gain or commercial interest.
And, distributing that cell phone photo is NOT a crime, because the photo itself (as set up in the original article) is NOT an infringement -- it's a fair use. Sure, you could be charged, but the threshold for being charged for any thing is pretty low.
Typically, counter claims will be heard at the same time as the original suit. And, the request for attorney's fees is just made in a motion at the end of the case. It's in the judge's discretion to award them, but it's certainly not a long drawn out process.
Fair use isn't particularly hard to prove if you have a good case. The nuisance is that the outer boundaries of fair use are unclear. Some things clearly are fair use (parody or minor incidental copying) and some aren't (wholesale copying and distributing of movies, for example).
Here are some reforms that I think should be made:
1. Shorten copyright term. I find it had to believe that a 90-year term provides any incentive to create than a 50-year term
2. Better define fair use. Especially in documentary filmmaking, there is a lot of over-protection, where a filmmaker will clear the rights to things that, reasonably, he was using fairly
3. Incidental copies made during playing or viewing of a work should be statutorily non-infringing
4. institute "Personal Use," allowing you to space-shift your music, make backup copies and so on
The example has a number of things which either (1) are fair uses, (2) aren't infringements at all or (3) aren't subject to copyright at all.
For example, the cell phone snapshot that happened to capture a copyright picture in the background -- that's clearly fair use. Displaying your tattoo in public doesn't make it a "public display." The forwarded emails are probably subject to an implied license and, even if they weren't, they may not contain sufficient creative expression to be copyrightable. The rough drawing of an architectural building is not an infringement (see 17 U.S.C. 120(a)). Reading the e.e. cummings poem is probably also fair use, especially if each student has a textbook containing the poem.
Copyright law is generally *civil*, not criminal. In general, this means that a lot of wrongs are ignored by potential plaintiffs, just as a matter of tradition, convenience and politeness, just as they are with a lot of other civil wrongs -- nuisance, trespass, assault** (especially among children), etc..... Nobody goes around saying "Look at how many acts of trespass you committed today. We need to fix trespass law."
[Note: I agree that copyright law needs some reforms; the repeal of Sonny Bono would be a great start. I just don't find this example to be very persuasive.}
The problem though is that the BSA's standards can catch even companies that are completely above-board, but haven't kept their receipts. The BSA's claim is that "If you don't have your receipt for this software, then it's pirated."
Now, whether that would stand up in court is a separate question. It seems to me that if you have a retail box for every piece of software, that should be good enough to convince a jury. Of course, the cynic says that the BSA is going after small companies because they're much less likely to fight, so what a jury would think isn't really an issue.
Of course, if you have a shopping-cart ordering model, then it's not a one-click buy.
...
Let's break that down with some specifics:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising;
1) a web browser
2) a web page about an item
3) where pushing "buy now" causes the web browser to send a "buy this item now" message to a web server
4) a web server
5) receives te request
6) looks up the purchaser's credit card number
7) creates an order for that purchaser in the order processing system which
8) Processes the order
9) all without a shopping cart
I suggest that the only potentially novel thing here is #3. And, I suggest that #3 is obvious -- the only reason that nobody was doing it before hand was that nobody had previously considered the problem of reducing the number of clicks it takes to get somebody to buy something.
You're right that there's nothing stopping Verizon from out-bidding all the other providers just to prevent competition by letting the spectrum sit idle. Well, nothing except $4.6B. Verizon is only going to do that if it thinks that, by doing so, its subscribers will give it $4.6B more than they otherwise would have.
And, now, that's going to be really difficult since Verizon is paying the price of locking out new competition, but AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, SunComm & the rest all receive the benefits of that lockout. That's hardly a great competitive position for Verizon.
As far as the "resource that should belong to everybody" thing goes, check out the "Tragedy of the Commons" in Wikipedia. Things that are owned by everybody are invariably overused, which drives down the total benefit. Granting a property right in that thing, which happens on the auction, is a common solution to the problem.
Well, that's the cynical view. The even more cynical view is that if they didn't get the revenue from the auction, they'd just raise my taxes even higher.
I propose a better alternative: just give it away in a lottery, but let the lottery winner sell the spectrum to whoever they want. The net effect would be about the same (unless you end up with some kooky winner who's unwilling to accept $4.6 billion), but the lottery winner would get the revenue, not the gov't.
If you have some proof that the carriers are coordinating their prices with each other, I'd love to see it. Horizontal price maintenance is a huge antitrust violation.
Watch out, though -- you can't use the fact that they all price the same, since that would also happen in a market without price maintenance. This is true even when prices go up -- it appears that people do not buy mobile phone service because of SMS message pricing. (BTW... I can buy unlimited messages for about an additional $10/month.)
They are not operating on radio spectrum that belongs to everybody. They're operating on radio spectrum that they bought at auction. Spectrum hasn't belonged to everybody in a long time -- pick your favorite local radio station and try broadcasting your own signal on the same frequency if you don't believe me. The only thing that's changed is how the government decides who gets it.
Now, I'm all for new entrants; I hope Google really shakes things up a lot. But, if they get outbid, it'll be because their model won't offer things that are as valuable to consumers as the high bidder.
Why not? The more who participate, the higher the price paid -- spectrum auctions offset my taxes.
Plus, if Verizon thinks it can out-bid Google and do something with the spectrum that its customers will be willing to pay more than $4.6B for, that's a good thing. If they turn out to be wrong and somebody else can, than Verizon's best bet is to sell the spectrum to that other company.
We're not talking about discussing a work; doing so doesn't implicate any of the copyright holder's Section 106 rights. So, you're right -- copyright doesn't come into that. But, that's not what we're talking about.
." The only question is where the line is drawn between that statement and the statement "Dumbledore dies in book 6"? You'd do better addressing the merits of what I'm saying than just asserting that I'm "Wronf."
The fact that an infringing activity makes a work more known or increases its sales DOES NOT make it non-infringing. A movie producer, for example, must still get permission from a book's author before turning it into a movie, even if the movie would increase sales of the book.
As far as the rest of your comment goes, how old are you, 12? I've already given an example of a "fact about a work" that infringes on that work: "the text of Harry Potter is as follows: . .
I think I said "You cannot copyright facts." So, no real argument there. But, I think that this is really the wrong way to analyze the current problem. In general, the idea about facts not being protected doesn't really apply to facts about a protected work. Facts contained in the work are unprotected, but facts *about* the work, depending on their expressiveness may be.
There is a popular, but unfortunately incorrect, belief that in order to infringe a book, you actually have to copy text from the book. In fact, the creative expression protected by copyright is deeper than the text itself. For example, in some circumstances, a character can be an appropriate subject of copyright. So, anybody who writes a book starring a 13-year-old orphaned student at an elite English school for wizards who happens to have a lightning-bolt shaped scar over his eye, given to him by his arch-nemesis when he was a baby, may very well be infringing the Harry Potter character, even if this other student were named "John Smith." The more similar John Smith is to Harry Potter, the more likely the infringement.
The difference is the "idea-expression" dichotomy -- ideas are not subject to copyright; you can only copyright your expression of those ideas. And, unfortunately, the line between the two is blurry, although there are things which are clearly on either side of that line.
I suggest that the better way to think about Dumbledore's death is to ignore the factual question and ask whether it's an idea or expression. I would argue that the death of the main character's mentor is really just an idea and thus, is not protected.
There's a distinction in copyright law between creative expression and factual information. You can copyright creative expression, you cannot copyright facts. And, you can only be held liable for infringing the creative expression, not the underlying facts.
You can't get around copying somebody's creative expression by calling it "a fact about their creative expression." The most obvious example of this is "the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is as follow . . . " You may technically be making a factual statement, but it would still be infringing since you're copying the creative expression.
It may be ridiculous, but that's approximately the legal theory used. If a person in the US refuses to work under a personal service contract, the other party cannot force them to do so. Now, that other party may have other remedies. For example, the worker may be prevented from doing the same work for somebody else (especially a competitor), or he may have to pay damages.
This is the main reason why athletes can "renegotiate" their contracts in the middle of the contract term -- if the team doesn't agree to renegotiate, the athlete just refuses to work. And, because the team's losses during his absence are pretty speculative, the athlete usually won't have to pay any damages. In fact, the only real leverage that the team has is that he won't be able to work for any other team during the term of his original contract.
Even if there was a 2-week statement in your contract, it's unenforceable. THe US gave up on the idea of involuntary servitude about 150 years ago. (Military service is an exception....)
Lest somebody take you at face value, you're just being cynical -- the statute does not differentiate. A corporation can also be found liable for $150,000 per infringement and an individual can be found liable for $750.
Well, in theory at least, they will never be told that they can pollute. What happens is that the community will say "We have an environmental reason to keep X out," and X may say "No you don't. Your claimed environmental reason is completely bogus. You just want to keep us out of your market." The tribunal's job, then, is to decide whether the environmental concern is actually completely bogus or not.
The end effect of this is to shift the ability to make decisions about which claimed environmental reasons are bogus away from state and local government and into a NAFTA tribunal. And, the NAFTA tribunal is (presumably) a lot harder to lobby. The NAFTA tribunal, however, is not the end word -- there's an appeals process, and (if it's a serious enough issue), the U.S. could just refuse to comply. The problem with the California example is that it shows that the process is working as intended.
The Avacado thing came from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/01/eveningnews/main1773839.shtml
The text of Chapter 11 is at http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/NAFTA/chap-111.asp. It's absolutely horribly written, but my read says that, basically, you can't treat foreigners differently than you treat your own citizens. Where I think most people get angry at chapter 11 is that it prevents a lot of thing that countries would do to protect their own industries. Now, often, that happens circuitously by raising environmental concerns about the foreign entrant. But, environmental concerns are often real, so Article 1114 has a huge carve-out that allows countries to establish actual environmental standards.
I'm not too worried by a case where somebody wanted to pollute, complained under NAFTA, and was told that, indeed, they could not pollute. That's a bit like saying "If Charles Manson had won his murder case, he would have killed more people. Therefore, the process that allowed Manson to have a trial (instead of just being sent straight to jail without one), is bad." The only way Methanex could have won was if there's no scientific basis for banning MTBE, only a basis based on keeping out foreign competition.
There are two real NAFTA questions:
(1) Are the parties to NAFTA better off with it than without it? I think the answer to this is clearly yes -- trade among the parties has increased enormously, which means that consumers in each country have a better selection of goods & prices than they did before NAFTA.
(2) How do you (or do you) compensate the losers under NAFTA? E.g., the Mexican corn farmers driven out of business by US corn producers, U.S. employees at clothing companies who can't compete with their lower-priced Mexican competition, etc....
This (2) is the tougher question to answer.
Well, my source was Science -- that article, I think, actually came from the Washington Post. I think that the most obvious evidence that organic farming doesn't yield as much as conventional farming is that if it did, agribusiness would be all organic.
I don't doubt that Mexico has its own losers under NAFTA, as does the U.S. does also. It's a little like Walmart coming to a community -- everybody's buying power shoots up a bit, except for the people who Walmart drives out of business. And, those people are always the ones fighting new Walmarts.
Note, for example, that while Mexican corn farmers are going out of business, Mexican Avacado farmers are doing well. Mexico's total exports to the US have more than doubled since NAFTA.
As far as evidence goes, check out http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0531-05.htm, referring to an article in Science. I'd link to the science article, but you have to pay for it.
As far as your belief that subsidizing the production of food somehow yields starvation, I'd be curious to see some scientific backup for that. To me, the idea that Mexicans are somehow worse off because they can buy food cheaper, and thus keep more of their own money, seems just bizarre. As for those farmers, they should switch crops -- they don't need to be cheaper than the US; they just need a comparative advantage.
Actually, at the moment, the big problem seems to be the diversion of corn to the manufacture of ethanol. Because of a screwy tax credit for ethanol production, corn prices have gone up dramatically, on both sides of the border. (I say screwy because the amount of energy you get out of corn-based ethanol is only marginally higher than they amount you put into making it. Converting sugar, on the other hand, is much more efficient.)
After hybrids, the next version of genetic modification, decades ago, involved irradiating the seeds, planting them and seeing what grew. When one of the plants grown from irradiated seeds produced a better crop, they saved the seeds from that plant, grew others, and sold the seeds. The same thing happens in nature, albeit on a much slower time frame. GM crops are just a way of being more selective about what you end up growing. How do you know that the corn plant your corn came from wasn't hit by cosmic radiation, changing some random gene? (Chances are, you've eaten many plants with some random genetic differences.)
How many generations of testing did people do on, say, broccoli, before deciding it was safe? There are probably over 1,000 varieties of tomatoes -- some were found growing naturally, others produced by irradiation, others by selective breeding and so on, with more coming out every year. How many of those varieties have had any sort of extensive testing? Ever picked wild berries? How did you know that the particular variety wasn't toxic somehow?
Genetic modifications allow foods to store longer, avoid insects and disease, withstand shipping, provide more nutrients and be more tasty (typically not all at the same time). This means that we can eat strawberries in the middle of the winter, eat tastier corn in the summer and provide more nutritious soybean plants to third-world countries. It means that farmers get better yields, throw less food away, and can thus reduce prices. Lower prices mean fewer people starving, and more savings. It's a good thing.
Not scamming their customers, just everybody else. It's hard to reconcile the view of an 'honest person who happens to be engaged in something illegal' with identity theft, credit-card fraud and denial-of-service attacks.
I agree that *most people* would. But, some wouldn't. And, there are cases were most people would not -- what happens if, say, it was copied into something that your father wouldn't agree with. Maybe he was a staunch Democrat and his painting was being used by a Republican presidential candidate.
Sometimes economic harm is just hard to quantify. For example, if GM copies a Ford advertisement. What's the economic harm to Ford? How do you know?
There is another possible type of harm -- the harm to the right to be able to control how an author's work is used. While US law protects such rights less than many other countries, the concept is still in the background of things like Section 106A, the derivative work right and statutory damages.
There is a good argument that copyright damages should be limited solely to actual economic damages. But, that would dramatically cut back on the protection provided by US copyright law.