WSJ Says Pro-ACTA Forces Helped Drive Anti-ACTA Reactions 180
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."
Re:Sausages made in public (Score:4, Funny)
sausages should be made public.
There's an alarming quantity of websites where people do exactly that.
I'm ok (Score:5, Funny)
with it.
they don't go backwards. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Leaked docs (Score:3, Funny)
While in general, I would agree, I'd also say that the devil is in the details. Remember the Bill of Rights, and why it was thought necessary? Even though it made criminals out of large swathes of the American population? Sometimes, people act so barbarically that the law needs to make criminals out of the majority of people - or at least criminalize what a large chunk of the population considers right.
What this means is that the broadness of a law and who it criminalizes should not enter into consideration when analyzing whether a law is good, just, either or neither. Ultimately, what matters in a law is whether it was created by following established procedures, both in spirit and in black and white scribblings on paper.
And before you argue that point - individual freedom provides inherent benefits to society that should not be abrogated lightly, or without due consideration.
Yoda (Score:4, Funny)
As does.