Why does no one ever demand scientific accountability? Let the government state its case, make testable claims and see if reality bears them out - and and scrap it if it does not even work out on paper!
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
- H. L. Mencken
I think that pretty much covers it.
The Commission, on the other hand, has warned against alarmist scenarios. It emphasises that ACTA is about tackling large scale criminal activity, not about limiting civil or consumer rights.
I really, really hate stuff like this. Why doesn't anyone call the industry on this? Whenever I hear "but it won't be used against small-scale infringers" I want to shout at them THEN FUCKING PUT IT IN THERE! Put it in writing, in the treaty / law / whatever, that it can't be used if fewer than 200 files are shared. Spell it out that you won't prosecute anyone who possesses less than a quarter of his whole movie collection as illegal downloads.
Two reasons why we should not accept wishy-washy talk like this:
Why can people like that get away with blatant lies like that time and time again?
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MySpace demanded that GoDaddy pull the plug on Seclists.org, which hosts some 250,000 pages of mailing list archives and other resources, because a list of thousands of MySpace usernames and passwords was archived on the site. GoDaddy claims its customers own about 18 million domains.
GoDaddy complied. In a move that Seclists.org owner Fyodor Vaskovich said happened with no prior notice, the company deleted his domain name — causing his site to be effectively unreachable for about seven hours on Wednesday until he found out what was happening and removed the password list.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.