'Son of ACTA' Worse Than Original 288
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."
Re:good (Score:4, Interesting)
"This is where it takes you" is an apt way to put it. I don't think capitalism was ever meant to be a final solution; it was meant to be a steppingstone, and it was far in advance of pre-capitalist systems in terms of the social change it's allowed.
Capitalist means the capital--means of production--are privately held and can be used for private profit. The alternative is capital being held by the state, which is amazingly good at keeping the status quo or responding to clear challenges (invasions, keeping up with the Jones, space race, energy race, etc) but is not nearly nimble enough to drive innovation by random, untested entrepreneurs. There's frankly no way that such people could have driven innovation unless they could could convince The Authority Figure with The Money to give it to them. Now, at worst, they have to convince An Authority figure with Money, but it could be one of hundreds (or maybe thousands or millions, depending on the startup costs).
But it ain't right, because in the end, what do you do when you've beaten the game (to put it in such terms)? If you've ever played a game like Civilization or even one more directly about Just Making Money, you know that eventually you've achieved every achievement and the game just ends. But if that game were your life, what do you do when you no longer have profit to make? Game over don't happen 'til you die.
If you ask me, the people who are doing this shit are (to extend the metaphor unduly) people who've completed the game and are going after every last achievement, even the ones the designers put in there just to be dicks. "Become the leading producers of entertainment worldwide--check. Pass legislation worldwide so that every poor sod worldwide is under your thumb--working on it. Wait... become a tyrant that's destroying the happiness of billions... why do I have this achievement?"
Seriously, they've lost their focus and their minds, and they ought to either be shot or stripped of all money and forbidden from ever engaging in capitalist endeavors again.
Re:Ok (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [uk.coop] - 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.
Kills right to resale? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.