The oligarchy in China is at least out in the open and nationalistic.
In the west the oligarchy does everything in secret, their motives are largely unclear, and they keep everyone focused on culture war issues that never get resolved and celebrity like gossiping about politicians. Meanwhile, the lobbyists and the rest of the oligarchy write absurdly complex bills and pass them in obscurity.
In Russia it's a bit of a hybrid of the western and eastern system.
Your comment is now at the top of this page because you posted something others agree with but offered no suggestion as to combating ACTA or raising awareness. I don't know if I'm more annoyed by your comment or by the voters.
Well if I ran the circus I would go launch an investigation to find out which individuals wrote these bills, get the meeting minutes in which they were discussed, etc. Then I would publicly interview these faceless nameless bureaucrats on TV and make them run for election instead of being buried in the depths of various obscure government agencies, NGOs, law firms and lobbying organizations where they can just pull these 100 page long bills out of seemingly nowhere and get them passed with hardly a whimper from the public.
No, it's just that their's quite a large number of assholes to go around and the primary problem of civilizations is keeping them acting in the best interest of the governed.
But everything else isn't equal - the reason why 'their' governments can and 'our' governments can't is because it is so much worse there. It's silly saying that 'at least the chinese gov't is honest' because for a start it's not, and secondly because they already have the strongarm power to halt dissenting opinions. First-world countries generally have a ton of avenues to make your voice heard with some degree of fairness. Lauding China because the government already has such iron-fisted control that it can be more straightforward is just stupid.
American lobbyists had direct access to the drafting of the treaty while the european parliament was told it was secret for them due to national security issues. No comment necessary.
Furthermore they are doing this with full knowledge that it is solely threatening civil rights / creates censorship and does not provide any real benefits or would otherwise be required. Out of the 27 EU states only 11 were recently able to fiddle / write up at least some minimal justification for the underlying data collections and storage that will then enable ACTA. Most of the countries did not even provide data back to the EU commission.
Like most of the times in history when such powers were "lawfully" provided to governments or special groups within society it might not be the government(s) bringing in such foul regulations it's the ones that follow after them who will fully exploit these unconstitutional measures.
Let's hope that the Stop ACTA movement will take up speed and people will listen before these rules are ratified by the countries.
Otherwise soon a very few will make some extra billions exploiting society while we all will pay with our civil rights, or freedom and certainly also with hundreds of billions of our monies.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3514232 - ACTA will NOT pass as of now since it's in validation of Basic Human Rights Bill, so it looks with exception of Poland and Czech EU is safe, but i have high hopes that our (polish) parliament will not ratify the document. So lets hope not everything is lost.
The reason for the confusion is that PAP (Polish Press Agency) reported this "news" today, giving the wrong date, and all the major news outlets re-reported it without checking (how hard is it to go to the ECJ website?). TVN24 has now published a correction, but the information has already spread and now many people think ACTA has been made illegal.
The truth is that the ECJ has never made any ruling about ACTA. It has only ruled that ISP filtering is illegal in the EU, but that is not directly in contradiction with ACTA.
The blog post you linked says ACTA contains a three-strikes provision. That used to be true, but it isn't anymore. Just read the final text.
Furthermore, I see nothing in ACTA that contradicts the ECJ ruling (ACTA does not say anything specific about ISP filtering) and I haven't seen any serious source claim that this ruling makes ACTA illegal.
I'm not a lawyer only a humble developer, I think the only thing we can do in EU is to put pressure on EU parliament to not agree to the pact - that's all.
I question the 'expertise' of a random poster on the internet and the reasons they would go to such lengths (astroturfing does happen, especially with powerful lobbyists in play). I'm no lawyer but just glancing at their 'analysis' I spotted something which suggests they have little knowledge of EU law and practices, or simply chose to ignore it. They try and defend Article 11 with
>Aha. If an ISP only keeps IP logs for a month, or doesn't do so at all, then the copyright holder is without any recourse. You can't hand over information you don't have.
and again
>whilst ISPs may be ordered to hand over information on infringers, there is nothing requiring them to gather information to do so, and there is a specific clause
I guess they don't know about the Data Retention Directive (2006) then. Where I live in the EU ISPs keep data for the max 2 years.
I find it ironic that we had some Romanian sites go black in response to SOPA which was an US issue but today Romania signed ACTA and nobody did anything.
There needs to be a better way to communicate this problem.
http://www.stopacta.info/ has a lot of information but only for people who are interested in this matter will stay, everyone else just leaves.
The thing about legislation like ACTA is that countries are often pressured by the US to put it into place. Then, with a wave of the hand, American politicians argue that, "we must get in step with the rest of the world."
> Either corrupt, or ass-kissing douches that have no idea why they are there.
Sure they do - they're there for their own personal gain. The second-most important thing is the benefit of their "campaign contributors" - in other words: the companies/people that bribe them.
So it's not the politicians "own personal gain" that is primarily behind of this, but the gain of companies/people. The politicians are just puppets for the men in power of the economy.
In the west the oligarchy does everything in secret, their motives are largely unclear, and they keep everyone focused on culture war issues that never get resolved and celebrity like gossiping about politicians. Meanwhile, the lobbyists and the rest of the oligarchy write absurdly complex bills and pass them in obscurity.
In Russia it's a bit of a hybrid of the western and eastern system.