Presumably he wouldn't bring up the procedural objection if he didn't care about the content. A vote in two chambers of congress would give opponents of the treaty (or agreement or whatever you want to call it) at least two more opportunities to oppose it in public. Congress is more responsive to public mood than the executive branch. I think it was an ambassador who signed the treaty in Japan over last weekend. That's an event that much harder to make a stink about than a vote in the legislature.

Exactly, thank you for putting it so succinctly. ACTA was badly named. It is not what it pretends to be. This seems to be a common understanding among people who've studied the treaty. Another good article in the American University Washington College of Law series, this one written by Margot E. Kaminski, say that:

"ACTA is primarily a copyright treaty, masquerading as a treaty that addresses dangerous medicines and defective imports."

The reasons that software professionals and free/open-stuff advocates have opposed the treaty has nothing to do with trade law, and everything to do with the criminal penalties for IP violations and the changing relationship between ISPs and their customer.

I disagree, ACTA is not, at heart, a trade agreement at all. It's a law enforcement treaty focusing on intellectual property. It aims to harmonise the enforcement measure with regard to intellectual property across the signatories. There's evidence for this in every portion of ACTA, but you just have to look at the headings for the two substantive chapters:

• Chapter II: Legal Framework for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
• Chapter III: Enforcement Practices

This doesn't diminish your point or Senator Wyden's. To quote an excellent article by Sean Flynn, ACTA would affect:

"evidentiary standards required for property seizures and criminal prosecution. It would affect state common law, where many trade secret obligations reside. And primarily it would affect the evolution of federal law, including the large federal statutory enactments on patents, copyrights and trademarks."

The president doesn't have any enumerated (or un-enumerated) powers that cover this territory, indeed, the power to regulate intellectual property, I understand, is an enumerated power of congress (Article I, sec 8 of the constitution). Therefore the agreement should be submitted to congress by the president and more specifically by the USTR under his authority.

It's true they lack a goal or objective and that's because they're a genuine, burgeoning social movement, not something else. When many people step out on the street together, they're not all going to be there for a single, shared reason, at least not at first.

Social movements are all about three things:

• making collective claims in public over a period of time
• using a set of social movement strategies
• and demonstrating worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.

The movements in the Muslim world earlier this year didn't all start with the demands that they ended up with. They took to the streets because they were upset and wanted to shout. That's what going on with the Occupy Whatever protesters too. Most basically, these public performances "assert popular sovereignty." They're democratic (small 'd'!), about the popular voice, showing that there is one and letting it speak.

The fact that these protests aren't motivated by a single voice or interest group encourages me, frankly. It means at the moment there are no shadowy figures behind the scenes pulling strings. There's a lot to shout about in the US at the moment. Me, I'm furious about the bank bailout, the budget crisis, political showboating, wasted war funds, executive bonuses, high unemployment, etc. If I'm anywhere near a protest, maybe I'll jump in and shout, too. If it turns into something I don't like, I'll bow out, or go someplace else the shout.

The list and other observation I've mentioned are all adapted from the writing of the academic Charles Tilly, who wrote the book on social movements.

Good points! I agree with everything you wrote.

Unfortunately, in the USA (haven't found info on the UK), the law as it stands makes the default situation exactly the opposite: the school owns the copyright on most lesson plans and other IP, as other people have described in other replies. It's crazy.

Also, I don't think anyone has suggested a good existing licensing solution that does what you're describing. A shame. Maybe the guy who posted the question will write a good license, with the school's legal council. Or maybe we'll have to live with the occasional injustice of a distance between the law and the expected behaviour until legislatures get around to solving the problem. In the US, there are proposals to change the 1976 copyright law to include an exemption for teachers.

No, Cory Doctorow gets it right. I've watched the video and, to promote my own posts for moment, I summarise above, but he's responding to comments by both Rolf-Dieter Heuer and Lynn Saint-Amour. You can see when he starts to compose his response, it's at 44:10 on the video just after Lynn Saint-Amour says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." His remarks also reply to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who asserted that patents, as a commercial tool, do not serve as a way to measure the basic research which produces "substantial change" instead "incremental change" (13:40) Therefore primary research serves, Heuer believes, as the most important driver of innovation.

In this context, Gurry is speaking up for the idea that traditional IP instruments should be used as the primary tools to drive innovation and to measure it. Don't be fooled by the mild tone of these kinds of meetings, it really is a tunnel-vision view. He's disagreeing with everyone who spoke before him.

In this case, the groupthink is right on and Francis Gurry's counter-history, such as it is, is patently(!) absurd. People are responding to his specific point about the web, which Cory accurately summarised. Thanks for the reasoned deviation from the party line, though. (I see it's been modded flame bait, now, but I disagree) You deserve an equally good counter-argument and I'll try to give it.

The context is a question posed to the panel: "How can countries, how can organisations improve in the area of innovation." In response to that question, and to the idea of measuring innovation that the Global Innovation Index aims to realise, everyone else on the panel talked about the important of things other than (you could say: in addition to) patents and traditional intellectual property tools. Daniele Archibugi included in his discussion of business innovations, an emphasis on the importance of institutions like schools (17:49) and of the infrastructure for innovation -- including the commons of the internet. Naushad Forbes called patents a "limited indicator of new product innovations and an almost non-existent indicator of new service and new business model innovations" (25:53), meaning that they do not account for the range of different kinds of innovation. Leonid Gokhberg talked about "differentiated policy mixes for different industries" as well as for different types of companies (33:57) because "innovation should be taken in its broad sense, including its non-technological, social, and environmental [effects]" (12:14).

Rolf-Dieter Heuer talked about how the Index fails to measure true innovation because it measures patents and not basic science, which he argues is the essential driver of innovation, essentially an inaccurate indicator instead of the thing itself (13:32). He values "substantial change" over "incremental change" (13:40). As an example of this problem, he cites the invention of the world wide web, which because it was not patented would not have shown up in this index, and yet reflects an important innovation of current age (to understate the case).

Francis Gurry addresses his concluding "white card" comments in response to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but they apply as much to Lynn Saint-Amour's remarks, indeed you can see him begin to compose his words at 44:10 after she says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." She talked generally, not terribly on-topic, about how innovators can use openness to their advantage and the value of non-traditional channels of innovation (the last point at 17:48).

In the context of everything that came before, Mr Gurry's specific comments about the world web web reflect a dogmatic misunderstanding of how the web came to be and how it worked, especially in the 1990s. It's a bizarre and irrelevant counter-history, as I assume is being argued elsewhere in this thread as I compose this long and detailed reply. In brief, if the web had been patented and commercialised it would indeed have been routed around, as Lynn Saint-Amour said. Also, it would not have returned the patent profits to basic research, as Francis Gurry suggests, because then it would have become applied research and the funds would have funded incremental change in the commercial environment, to use Professor Heuer's words. Gurry does not seem to have been listening to the academics and policy advisers around him. They're all saying "tradition IP instruments can't do it all." His response is that "intellectual property is a very flexible instrument" (50:13), essentially "oh yes it can too do it all."

I fancy you can get a measure of the inappropriateness of Gurry's remarks, and a comment on his blinkered focus when Heuer and Saint-Amour share an amused look at 48:59. It's only expected that as self-professed nerds here on Slashdot, as internet partisans, as a group we prefer Heuer and Saint-Amour's perspective to Gurry's. Groupthink it may be, but it reflects deeply held affection for the web and the dynamics that make it possible. These are dynamics Francis Gurry appears to wilfully misunderstand in this video.

There's a legal question here and an administrative one. Either way, this isn't a decision to be made and announced through the employee handbook. It's great though how you set out just to write a bit of documentation and you end up in a legal a philosophical minefield.

The legal question is who has the right of ownership over intellectual property, such as lesson plans, that teachers produce or use on the job. I imagine the precedents vary by your jurisdiction. Your school should look it up. The way you phrase the question, it sounds as if there aren't any explicit provisions in the teacher contracts that establish who owns what. Maybe it's time for the school to include a clause in the contract that makes the expectations and the legal situation clear.

But really the more important issue is that, again from the way you phrase your question, it sounds as if the school administration seems to expect to dictate terms of intellectual property ownership to its teachers. Regardless of whether they have the legal right to do that, it's just plain bad policy, a great way to pick an unnecessary fight. The administration should do what you're doing now, do some research and decide on a good model for a policy. Then they should bring the issue up at a faculty meeting, ask faculty what they want, give them a chance to go away and read about it, and then come back with their own proposal. Ideally, if you've got good administrators (sounds like they/you have good will, at least) who can negotiate well with faculty based on interests and not positions, then everyone leaves the room happy.

The wrong way to do it is for you, the Director of Technology, to make the decision, present it to the rest of the administration who accept it by default because they don't have any better ideas, and let the faculty know who owns their lesson plans by putting a handbook in their mailboxes at the start of the next term. The value of the intellectual property is either too small to be worth alienating employees or too valuable to approach sloppily.

The usual disclaimers: I'm not a lawyer or a teacher.

Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?

There is now.

Ah ha! But how do you tax a yacht made out of bread!? :D

Anyway, I'm glad to hear it's that easy.

Well, I'm not an economist, as I said. My field is even less scientific. My guess is that incidence differs under different conditions. In the human sciences, any more consistent result would surprise me.

At a certain point this starts to get into the territory of: go look for the evidence your own darn self. However, because I'm looking for a distraction and I have access to scholarly papers that publish this kind of evidence, I'll point you (and anyone else who's interested, because it's always possible I'm replying to a troll or to a rhetorical question -- those should be banned online, by the way) toward some resources that I've found but haven't read.

• Corporate Tax Burden in the European Union. By: García, Santiago Álvarez, Rodríguez, Elena Fernández, Arias, Antonio Martínez, EC Tax Review, 09282750, Feb2011, Vol. 20, Issue 1
• Sales tax equity: Who bears the burden? By: Derrick, Frederick W., Scott, Charles E., Quarterly Review of Economics & Finance, 10629769, Summer98, Vol. 38, Issue 2
• The Economic Incidence of Replacing a Retail Sales Tax with a Value-Added Tax: Evidence from Canadian Experience. By: SMART, MICHAEL, BIRD, RICHARD M., Canadian Public Policy, 03170861, Mar2009, Vol. 35, Issue 1
• INCIDENCE AND ACCIDENTS: REGULATION OF EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION THROUGH THE TAX CODE. By: Mullane, Joy Sabino, Lewis & Clark Law Review, 15576582, Summer2009, Vol. 13, Issue 2
• PERFECT COMPETITION, URBANIZATION, AND TAX INCIDENCE IN THE RETAIL GASOLINE MARKET. By: ALM, JAMES, SENNOGA, EDWARD, SKIDMORE, MARK, Economic Inquiry, 00952583, Jan2009, Vol. 47, Issue 1

This is fun, it brings back the stale smell of undergraduate economics courses. IANAE, but if I recall correctly, one problem with a sales tax is that it's regressive. Its burden falls disproportionately on the less well off. Assuming an equal tax rate on all goods and of all consumers, it's a flat tax: everyone pays the same percentage. However, the same percentage of expenditure means more to someone with less. It's "fair" in that it treats everyone equally, but it's not fair in that it doesn't effect everyone equally. Of course fairness comes up when you're discussing tax policy, but I think you have to remember that life isn't fair and you're not going to solve that through the US tax code.

As you say, at first blush, a sales-tax-only code looks like it would also create an incentive to take money out of the country. People from elsewhere would want to be paid in dollars in the US and spend them abroad. Tax law isn't easy and anyone who says it is... well they're wrong!

While I didn't take economics in Junior High, my High School course taught me that the supply of most goods is not perfectly price elastic. It taught me that in theory taxes are only partially passed on to the consumer except in cases of perfect price elasticity. It taught me that in theory, except in cases of perfect price inelasticity of supply, higher taxes on businesses will result in higher prices and fewer goods being sold in that market. Apparently this concept is called tax incidence, though I don't remember that from High School. It also taught me that a tax on individuals is not the same as the tax on corporations. Therefore, based on what I learned many years ago in high school economics, in the case you're talking about, which has very little to do with the proposed tax on individuals, it's true that the consumer bears some of the burden of those taxes. However, it's also true that corporations do in fact pay taxes. That is, ceteris paribus, assuming things like that they don't totally avoid the taxes by using loopholes.