Way too easy. If you thought SOPA and PIPA were bad, meet ACTA.
The fundamental problem is that the movie, recording, drug, and other industries have way more money and political influence than the people who benefit from legitimate fair use. I hope that technology companies, who have been reluctant to exercise political power, come to their senses in the future, especially after this first success.
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After reading up on ACTA, I was reminded strongly of Monsanto, the corporation that has a monopoly on our corn crop. They control 98% of the corn that is produced in America, and are constantly driving out competitors, using tactics that work because of laws like ACTA.
A local corn farmer can be dragged into court for having a single corn plant that came from Monsanto seed. It doesn’t matter if that seed was dropped by a bird or planted by a Monsanto worker for the express purpose of driving that farm out of business. If it’s on that farmer’s property, they will be out of the corn business in less than a year.
Essentially, ACTA promotes monopolies, which end up destroying the free market and setting up a situation where innovation is stagnant and new businesses are an impossible dream. The worst part is, I don’t remember hearing about ACTA back in ’07, which means there was probably little or no public input about it. I fear it’s too late for us to get rid of it, but I hope we can.
Jeff, it’s even worse than you portray it. Monsanto has gone after farmers whose own crops have picked up genes from Monsanto seeds through pollen transfer. The Round-up resistant, genetically modified crop species have made huge in-roads into international agriculture. Monsanto continues to say that there is no evidence that their genetically modified seeds are impacting neighboring farms or natural processes when there is significant evidence that both are happening. (Check out http://www.agbioforum.org/v4n2/v4n2a02-jemison.pdf – as far back as 1999, it was clear that cross pollenization was occurring.) USDA continues to approve these crops for general use, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to those with the knowledge to refute Monsanto and friends. It’s a pretty sad situation.
Back to the subject at hand. I fully agree with IK. The biggies will keep pushing their desires through congress under one guise or another. Back when I spent a bit of time working to stop a dam on the Mad River in NW California, the anti-dam group had an informal saying something like a dam is never really stopped – it’ll just keep coming back in another form. The IP freaks are very much not going to rest until they’ve gotten what they want. They can use the rider technique which makes it almost impossible to monitor and react. Put a rider for IP on a bill for helium inspection at the last minute and it sails right through cause no one was watching. Insidious.
my favorite quote from Monsanto’s Wikipedia article:
As of May 2008, Monsanto is currently engaged in a campaign to prohibit dairies which do not inject their cows with artificial bovine growth hormone from advertising this fact on their milk cartons.[27] When the Federal Trade Commission did not side with Monsanto on this issue, the company started lobbying state lawmakers to implement a similar ban.
Lose in court? Just go over their head and start buying representatives