Obama Backs MPAA, RIAA, and ACTA 703
boarder8925 writes "In a move sure to surprise no one, Obama has come out on the side of the MPAA/RIAA and has backed the ACTA: 'We're going to aggressively protect our intellectual property,' Obama said in his speech, 'Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people [...] It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it's only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can't just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.'"
"Single greatest" = "sole remaining" amirite? (Score:5, Interesting)
Next up: The Texas schoolboard mandates that textbooks 'de-emphasise' the RECORDED HISTORICAL FACT that Hollywood was founded on industrialised copyright infringement.
I really despise obama now. (Score:5, Interesting)
despite i have been a staunch supporter of him and quarreled with my conservative american friends for close to a year since his candidacy to his election and even beyond.
really, from this point on, i dont think i will be hypocritical to defend him in any regard. there are things that can be overlooked and forgiven, noone is perfect. but ransoming rights and liberties of the thought process to private individuals is nothing less than feudalism at its best. and someone who can justify this to himself cannot be defended in anything else.
Re:We should all copyright... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually assuming you have a particular way you go about accomplishing your job, it might actually be patentable.
I remember not long ago some company was trying to patent how they ran their business, something to do with how to schedule and conduct the business meetings I believe.
Another un-winnable war. (Score:5, Interesting)
We sure know how to pick 'em.
How the Constitution could have saved us... (Score:1, Interesting)
When you throw out all the things you think you'd like the federal government do and just read what it should be, it's clear that politicians have created a self-feeding machine.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights state that the federal government has jurisdiction in a number of areas, and all other rights belong to the states (unless the states specifically give up a right via an amendment). Lobbying Congress, bribing a Senator, etc... was supposed to be of little value to business because states set their own policies. This would mean that businesses would naturally move to where the climate was most hospitable and states would have to balance heavy-handed regulation and taxes with the jobs and prosperity that attracting businesses would bring.
When a fundamental shift of power from the states to Washington occurs, the balances are gone, everyone stops competing, and instead tries to secure favorable legislation nationwide. Now we have the unholy alliance of government and corporations. Politicians depend on corporate money and corporations depend on provisions biased in their favor.
Our decentralized nation was a good idea. Perhaps a bit inconvenient at times, but it allowed many different ideas to be tested across the country and empowered people with better access to government. We need to re-establish the Constitution as the Law of the Land and hold those accountable who willfully violate it.
Neal Stephenson is a genius (Score:5, Interesting)
When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
Re:Wild West Internet will be gone (Score:5, Interesting)
IP is going to be the foundation of any future economy.
IP is just various monopoly rights. See the former Soviet union on how well monopolies work. Monopolies are antithetical to an effective economy and thus will not be a foundation, but a burden.
it'll be up to our inventions and our software and our innovation in exporting ideas
Please. IP is mainly good for extracting resources out of an economy, it has nothing to do with 'exporting'. Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy, and most of the time (certainly in the case of the US), the monopoly rights will be held by foreign corporations.
The only way forward is to make western economies competitive again. Repealing at the very least copyright and patents would be a good start towards reestablishing a highly competitive free market and lowering the burden on western labour (thus reducing their price).
Tech savvy -- Why would you think that? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know that Obama is more tech-savvy than any President prior ...
Why would you think that? Do you consider every lawyer or politician in love with their blackberry to be tech savvy? Every politician on twitter to be tech savvy? Obama is extremely intelligent but his training and experience is as a lawyer. We have had past presidents who were honest-to-god engineers. Carter was one of the first naval officers trained to operate nuclear power plants. Hoover was a mining engineer that developed various processes to improve yields. He wrote a popular university textbook for engineering and translated a classic medieval mining text. He was also an advocate and user of the new tech of his day, radio and aviation. I'm sure there were other presidents who were pretty tech savvy in their day but this is all I can think of offhand.
It's not just IP laws (Score:4, Interesting)
In a perfect world, more production per unit of labor would mean that we would all have to work less to achieve the same level of prosperity. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the U.S. because our current intellectual property laws allow a relatively few people to take the lion's share of the benefit from the production being done.
Not just IP laws. The fact that a lot of industrial manufacturing is capital intensive combined with the relatively small segment of social networks that access to capital flows in. Or, as Marx might have said, most workers don't own the means of production under a capitalist system. Go back in time and reduce patent and copyright protections circa 1910 or even 1810 (where the benefits were more limited) and story of how the gains in the system play out for labor is pretty much going to be the same.
It's not that copyright and patent laws don't represent another barrier to entry: they sometimes do. But most of the time, they pretty much protect industrial competitors from other would-be industrial competitors.
We software geeks tend to see things a bit differently because for the last 20-30 years, we're one of the few groups lucky enough to be in an industry where we do more or less own the means of production (got a computer? And a compiler? Or interpreter for a capable language? Congratulations! You have production capacity!) because it's relatively affordable. So our barriers to entry are less about capital and more about other things like product awareness, network effects... and cost of compliance with the law, including copyright & patent law.
Maybe this will become more important in the future if it turns out that more industrial capacity becomes available for ownership down at the household level, and that's reason enough to make sure copyright and patent law are a balance bargain rather than a giveaway to lawyers and other people whose sense of entitlement is so great that they really, genuinely view ideas as genuine property, and so I think fighting against ACTA and its ilk are worthwhile... but let's not kid ourselves, copyrights and patents haven't really been the main tool of abuse in the relationship between capital and labor.
Re:Not Trolling ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Who's obstructing? Democrats control Congress and the White House. Or have you not been paying attention? Who's fault is it that your President couldn't sell a fucking life raft to a drowning man, and that Democrats in Congress are so divided that they couldn't agree on if it is night or day?
The fact that you can't even comprehend that two different people with two completely different upbringings and experiences might have ideological differences is glaring proof of your blind partisanship and your intellectual inferiority. Try getting your talking points from somewhere besides the PuffPo or the Daily Kook for a change.
Cartels (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought cartels were generally considered illegal. By supporting these entities he is essentially supporting the notion of legal cartels. I think the USA is going to become more and more isolated in its point of views.
I had great hope for some real change when Obama came in, but he standing shows that there isn't really much separating the Democrats and the Republicans. For me, it really goes to show the whole notion of democracy in the states is more about changing the logo of the party in charge, rather than anything else. Which ever party is in charge, it is still the corporations which hold them by the balls. What it will take to institute a government which is by the people for the people, rather than by the people for the corporations.
I have nothing against copyright, rather I disagree with copyrights going beyond a reasonable amount of time.
One question I do have, is what will the reaction of the open source community be in 70 years when the first copyrights of Linux become public domain? This is not a indication of support for long copyrights, but trying to understand the reaction of the community when the shoe is on the other foot.
Well DUH. (Score:3, Interesting)
They're trade representatives of their respective industries. No shit that Obama's going to back them.
As much as we like to shit on the MPAA and RIAA, they make IP. subsequently, and often foolishly, they try to protect their IP. Which is their right.
I can't get riled up over IP violation law anymore. There's just so much more to life than ripping DVDs to put on my PSP, Phone or for backup purposes. I'm not saying that the cause is lost, just, not worth burning calories on on slashdot.
Re:How does it go? (Score:3, Interesting)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Honest personal opinion: If Obama gets ACTA passed, but -actually- fixes health care, I'm voting for him again.
Obviously, the two do not go hand in hand, and I'm making no statement as to the likelyhood of him actually fixing health care. If he passes ACTA, but not health care, I will be voting for someeone else and will publicly apologize for voting for him the first time. However, if saving political capital on this one means it can be spent on something that is a much bigger deal to me, then I don't at all regret voting for him.
Re:Let's Do Something (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, ACTA is aimed towards giving IP laws more power, globally. But how much do you think countries with real problems care about protecting IP laws from countries they don't care about?
From the position of the MPAA and RIAA there are several different positions that they care about or don't. Russians and Chinese copying music and movies isn't a big problem - those countries have always had large scale piracy operations and undeveloped IP markets, and the potential profit margins are thin or non-existant. If this were to change, then there would be an opportunity to develop new markets, which the RIAA/MPAA would be interested in. But at the moment the markets are lost. The real global battlefield is in the European Union - a larger market economy than the USA, where the average price for a DVD or CD is much higher than the US, and with a voracious appetite for American produced content. If groups like the Pirate Party begin to make serious headway in scaling back European copyright, then the RIAA/MPAA is going to lose control over one of its most profitable markets. The other market they really care about is (obviously) the USA. It is not such a large battlefield since U.S. laws are already more MPAA/RIAA friendly. By agreeing to a global copyright enforcement treaty, that is supported by American corporations, they will be able to easily pass legislation with broad cross-party support, and with little room for debate because the details have "already been agreed and signed" before being considered at the level of national law.
Because its consumers have to hand money to the IP owners abroad, with nothing to little coming back in return.
Have you got any idea how much money is spent by European consumers and businesses on U.S. software, movies, books, films etc?
Re:First rebellion (Score:3, Interesting)
It's downright scary thinking what might happen if World War 3 were to ever break out. The only reason we won WWII was because our factories produced weapons faster than the Axis countries (who's factories were being bombed). Virtually ALL of our industry was used for the war effort in order to accomplish this. But we'd never be able to win a conventional drawn-out war anymore. We simply don't have the industry anymore. And who does? China. And who's side are they likely to be on in WW3? Not ours. So it's virtually guaranteed that WW3 is going to be nuclear, since that's the only way we'd 'win' the war.
Re:First rebellion (Score:3, Interesting)
"Isn't any draconian law antithetical to prosperity?"
No, not really. You could pretty easily make a draconian law to that effect, but you can't possibly say that a law which (for example) allows suspected drunk drivers to be executed on the side of the road (extremely draconian) would realistically prevent everyone from being prosperous.
"I think the interesting question in this case is where the line is between "draconian" and "impotent". You'd think there would be a huge area in between, but we don't seem to be able to find it: a few people are getting penalised absurdly for relatively minor infractions, while millions of people continue to break the law at the expense of legal rightsholders and get away with it."
There is, and we used to have it, but people complained about the costs (which is ironic, because the solution is so very much more expensive in the long run) and "unfairness" (to be fair, there was a lot of it, but since there still is, so perhaps the flaw lies elsewhere...): we actually used to empower fairly low-level government officials and bureaucrats to use their god-given brains and make decisions. The upside was that rather than having one official with the ability to half-make decisions and 200 lackeys who serve to shuffle around paperwork in triplicate, we could have 3 or 4 officials with 1 or 2 secretaries each and spend a fraction as much (though far more per person... decision makers are expensive) to get far more done. The downside was that these people had huge amounts of discretionary power to abuse, and did so, blatantly. So now we pay a whole bunch more, have a lot more people involved, are less able to actually get anything done, and still have massive iniquities and waste. Go us.
Could be an honest move? (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes sense that our politicians on both sides would sick up for our successful industries. Don't hear about those two needing bailouts...
The USA doesn't EXPORT much of anything anymore:
Military and related products
Movies & Music & TV(?)
IP lawsuits
MSonopoly software
Gambling (aka Banking "products")
It makes sense these "industries" are largely untouchable; even when they screw over their own country.
Re:First rebellion (Score:3, Interesting)
We do still produce a lot of that kind of stuff domestically; manufacturing of consumer products has been offshored much faster than manufacturing of expensive industrial goods has. For example, the domestic car industry has declined, but the U.S. is still by a good margin the largest exporter of tractors. Manufacturing of military hardware has moved the least of all.
I'd probably be worried about commodities as a bigger issue. The most glaring one is that we used to produce a lot of oil, and now import most of it. Straddling the commodity/manufacturing line somewhat, the decline in U.S. steel production is probably a significant military issue, although our production actually is still reasonably high (steel-industry employment has been decimated, but number of tons of steel produced was roughly steady from 1980 through 2007 or so, dipping only in the recent recession).
Re:"Single greatest" = "sole remaining" amirite? (Score:3, Interesting)
Many independent filmmakers, who controlled from one-quarter to one-third of the domestic marketplace, responded to the creation of the MPPC by moving their operations to Hollywood, whose distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents.
This has the flavor of legend.
Three decades earlier Hollywood had been chosen by the emergent film industry for more than just a balmy climate and abundant sunshine. Within a day's drive from Los Angeles was an astonishing variety of topography. Hitchcock found on a production-office wall a map of California that marked where within the state could be found the Blue Nile, the Swiss Alps, the sands of the Sahara, Sherwood Forest, the rugged coast of Spain, the Siberian snows, the Red Sea, the South African veldt, to say nothing of the mighty Mississippi, the cattle ranches of Wyoming, the horse pastures of Kentucky, and the mountain forests of Vermont.
Perhaps the most memorable sequence in...all of Hitchcock's films--is the attempt by a bogus crop-duster to kill Cary Grant on an open prairie in Indiana. The Midwest state could hardly have looked so parched, but then the sequence was filmed near Bakersfield, California, in the sunbaked Central Valley.
Hitchcock on Location [americanheritage.com]
Heinlein said it best (Score:5, Interesting)
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea
that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the
public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged
with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing
circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is
supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or
individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock
of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Re:First rebellion (Score:3, Interesting)
Spotty, to be honest, but I wasn't actually expecting the Second Coming. The World is more willing to work with the US now. The war spendings are now in the budget, and I don't think we're torturing people anymore. We're not being scared like children every other day by orange alert levels. The health care reform - warts and all - seems to have a chance. The rich are no longer getting tax cuts that insult our intelligence. The economy is bad, but not as bad as it could easily have been. Compared to early 2009, it's certainly looking more like we can look up at the sky instead of down into the abyss.
Could he have done more? Sure, but I knew I was voting for a center-left pragmatist.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:First rebellion (Score:5, Interesting)
This is completely misleading. These numbers include goods produced by nominally American corporations even if all the work is done by employees based outside of the US. This particular scam has been debunked multiple times by the business press.
BTW, the US GDP numbers also include goods produced outside the USA by non-American labor.
If you strip out the work/products made by non-US employees of US corporations, you'll see that both the US GDP and exports have been in steep decline for the past decade.
Magnus.
Re:Let's Do Something (Score:2, Interesting)
>It always amazes me how people think they can influence the political climate by banding together and making their voices heard.
Of course they can. Have you ever noticed how $SOUND_BITE can instantly kill an issue?
Politicians might listen to lobbyists, but the one thing that overrides lobbyists is TELEVISION.
Re:We should all copyright... (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>they are you employee, keep on their back, force them to listen
Ahhhh so young. So naive. Here's a portion of an email I sent to my Senator: "re: The debate over cutting PBS' funding: Please do cut them. We live in a 100-channel universe with many, many channels such as TLC, Discovery, History, and so on to fill PBS' role. PBS was important in the 1960s when it was a 3-channel universe, but today it's been sidelined and is no longer crucial. Furthermore I never watch PBS, and feel no desire to fund something I don't watch --- let PBS stand on donations from its viewers and/or advertising....." et cetera.
His reply: "Yes I agree that PBS should receive more funds and I plan to fight this cut in their funding....." and so on.
They DON'T listen.
They are like an employee
that ignores everything you say.
Re:Neal Stephenson is a genius (Score:2, Interesting)
music
In your dreams boys, the UK is king of that particular hill.