As I said in an earlier post, the" MAY" clauses are a problem, because the governments / lobbyists who write the legislation required by the treaty will include them! Good luck with teh line-by-line scrutiny of the bills as they pass through your legislatures.
> The parts the EFF seems worried about are, in RFC terms, MAY clauses, not MUST or even SHOULD clauses.
The problem?
The ACTA treaty confers powers with dangerously broad and ambiguous language - an example is language to ban:
a device or product, including computer programs, or provision of a service that... has only a limited commercially significant purpose other than circumventing an effective technological measure.
So legitimate purposes that are significant, but can be made out not to be commercially significant, won't protect you. Education and research purposes, and fair use gone, at one stroke!
The international coordination is all about the interests of "intellectual property" owners (mostly distributors, in the content industries), and not about consumers or the broader creative economy. The only stakeholders explicitly mentioned are "rights holders" - if we're lucky, the rest of the world may sneak in as "other relevant
stakeholders" - but don't hold your breath - it hasn't happened yet, and isn't happening in the shady negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. And the only measurement or analysis to be done is about how well they tackle the nut of infringement, with no examination of the sledgehammer of social and economic costs of the enforcement regime ACTA requires.
Then there are the optional extras such as:
A Party may exclude from the application of this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in travellers’ personal luggage. [a Good Thing]
and
A Party may provide for the remedies described in this Article to be carried out at the infringer’s expense. [not necessarily A Good Thing]
A good government would implement the protections ACTA says they MAY do, and omit some of the more onerous and opressive powers the lobbyists got into ACTA as optional extras.
Our governments, on the other hand, will use draft legislation written by the same content industry lobbyists who wrote the original ACTA policy shopping list, and will try to omit every inconvenient consumer protection measure some ACTA negotiaters insisted on, and include each of the overreaching powers the negotiators reduced from MUST to MAY in ACTA.
Or we can just stop worrying and hope that the law-faries will bring us cuddly, fair and reasonable legislation that servers the public interest, instead.
Adam and Eve weren't the first humans to exist. They were the first to receive a soul which is what makes humans different from all other animals...
Scary AND incoherent: if the soul makes humans different from animals, how could there be humans [even before Adam] without a soul?
If you think there can be people with souls and people without souls, then you may feel tempted to do or allow sorts of evil to anyone you consider "without soul". Though some so-called musicians clearly don't have soul, and deserve all manner of evil. Get those kids with their walkpods off my lawn.
From what I read here, outside of the USA, where the media are less partisan when covering internal US issues
Are you kidding? Britain in particular is way left-of-center.
By less partisan, I mean not so much dominated by the twin US-centric filters of either "the Democrats are destroying the country" or "the Republicans are destroying the country". Also, the broadcast media in Britain are generally committed to presenting two views (and exactly two views) on any issue. It's almost the same as balance, and a lot more like balance than what Fox / Huf Post do.
As for "Britain is left-of-center", in Global terms Britain is probably a little right-of centre, with privatised industries, private participation in healthcare, and competition in broadband provision . The US is a lot further to the right (except for the competition in broadband provision bit), which may explain why the rest of world looks a bit communist.
Perhaps the "center" is somewhere far to the right of the "CENTRE"?
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less. Who do you think is right here?
A plague on both their houses!
From what I read here, outside of the USA, where the media are less partisan when covering internal US issues, the Democrats want the government to spend LESS, and the Tea Party wants the government to spend LESS too. They disagree a little on which parts of government should have most cuts.
Also, the Democrats want to increase taxes a little, to narrow the gap between government spending and income.
The Tea Party DO NOT want to increase taxes to narrow the gap.
Both are proposing that the government spend more than it raises.
Did I miss anything important?
This sort of thing is why the EU's half-witted privacy rules on cookies miss the point.
The thing to control is the tracking of users (particularly without their consent), and the storage and onward transmission/sale of user-information - not some particular technology that is being used to do that at any given stage in the evolution of the web.
Of course, if your legislative process is owned by the corporate world, or your voters believe in the rights of corporations, rather than citizens, that is unlikely to happen.
"Pay the fair share of taxes"... What does that even mean?
I'm guessing it means that tax paid as a proportion of income should be similar for the rich and the poor (Or maybe slightly higher for the rich, because they can "afford" a little more). I gather that, at present, the rich tend to pay a much smaller proportion of their income.
If the ratio is massively out of line then something would seem to be rotten with the State of the Union.
I would like to seee credible figures on this though... if gathering them would not make government too big
HOLY MACRO!