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."

Sausages made in public

[Kupfernigk]

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.

I would love it

[Kupfernigk]

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.

The guy from Dirty Jobs should visit Parliament...

[captainpanic]

If making a law is so dirty, it's about time it makes the show.

Re:Sausages made in public

[SomeKDEUser]

This. A million times this. There is never an excuse for not being transparent.

See, if you don't want me to see the law you are writing, clearly it means you know I won't agree. Now in a democracy, who are you to redact a law which does not have popular support? Bismark was not a democrat, and his laws were acts balancing the public interest, yes, but also all the special interests who supported the empire.

There is no place for that in a democracy.

Re:Leaked docs

[Tsingi]

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.

Yes. At the end of the day, if a law exists that makes a criminal out of the majority, then it does not serve society, rather it serves to subjugate.

In a free society the primary intent of law is to safeguard the freedom of the people.
In a totalitarian society laws primarily exist to protect the ruling class from the people.

It is unlikely that a law will be passed in a free society without the consent of the governed. No such considerations are required in a totalitarian state. Wikileaks is a threat only to governments that have something to hide.

Re:FTFA

[Joce640k]

RIAA group: 10,000 employees, profits in the single digit billions.

Internet: Hundreds of millions of employees, profits in the trillions.

a) Getting rid of which of them would cause more harm.

b) If everybody in the USA chipped in $100 bucks they could BUY the RIAA and get free music forever. If you did it at world level it would easily doable.

c) The RIAA has probably already cost the world than their net worth by wasting everybody's time through their legal/political shenanigans.

Re:FTFA

[dapyx]

Actually, "counterfeit medicine" is a euphemism for "generic drugs", i.e. drugs that have been manufactured and sold without paying the patent owners anything. Some drugs (especially for various types of cancer) cost more than $100,000 per treatment and some third-world countries produce their own local "generic" version of the drug, since they can't afford paying that much for saving just one life. The production costs for a drug sold for a six-figure sum are typically under $100. The "big pharma" try to prevent poor consumers from first-world countries from traveling to third-world countries and buy these drugs, this is all there is to it.