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[jaked122]

Have you guys seen the intellectual property things in the TPP? Some of them are just capable of taking down websites without any kind of court ruling if so much as a copyright infringement claim is brought against it.

 I'm not for that, as the DCMA did us so much good. Then there's the trade secrets, which would make it impossible to report on unscrupulous practices used by companies by calling them trade secrets.

It looks like a lot of these laws are in place to produce an oligarchy from the already potent plutocracy. A lot of this stuff looks like it's only in a trade agreement because they couldn't figure out a way to get it past the constitutions of the countries involved(where the countries have constitutions in the first place).

There don't seem to be provisions for challenging these claims. There's also something about DNS entry owners having to register with their real name. Not something I'm inherently suspicious of, but it does appear to demand a lot of accountability from internet users while offering them nothing from the corporations that are going to be collecting on it.

Overall, the intellectual property stuff is much more alarming to me than "Whose standards do we use?", of course, that stuff could be horrifying abused as well, but I tend to worry more about establishing and spreading a horribly broken intellectual property law across many nations in such a manner that it cannot be challenged.

[jaked122]

Did you not read my earlier posts?

Sorry, I missed those skimming through. I'm just a little confused about the intensity that the cheese stuff has been brought up. I get that its protecting traditional manufacturing of these... "Cultural products"... heh.

Also, this deal makes white-hat hacking illegal and results in the destruction of devices containing the information. Without white hat hackers, our software would be as buggy and security hole ridden as software(OSs in particular) were in the early 2000s. I don't care about the end user not seeing the effects until they realize that all the devices they own have been stealing their money and the companies that made them were unaware of the problems that allowed it to happen. This is about the principle.

And the principle that you ought to be able to test whether or not software is safe to use and inform the company and the world at large about issues so that it may be fixed, or the company can be pressured into it by their customers is important. If we lose that, we've lost our computers, any semblence of security, and traded it for corporate prestige for corporations that would rather automate their employees out of it.

[TheBiggerFish]

...Don't companies hire external specialists for security stuff anyway?

[Culise]

...Don't companies hire external specialists for security stuff anyway?

Plus, vigilante white-hat hacking is also illegal in some jurisdictions as it is, under the logic that unauthorized access is unauthorized access regardless of what you claim as your intent.  Just because you believe it's for the greater good doesn't mean anyone else agrees.  It's simply a matter of the fact that some people are less willing to press charges than others if you tell them how you did it and don't actually cause actual harm. 

[TheBiggerFish]

...Don't companies hire external specialists for security stuff anyway?

Plus, vigilante white-hat hacking is also typically illegal as it is - unauthorized access is unauthorized access, regardless of what you claim as your intent.  Just because you believe it's for the greater good doesn't mean anyone else agrees.  It's simply a matter of the fact that some people are less willing to press charges than others if you tell them how you did it and don't actually cause actual harm.

Yeah.  That too.

[Helgoland]

-snip-

Okay, maybe I should have expressed myself more clearly: The only argument I expect an American with no cultural understanding of Europe to understand is the 'lying to the consumer' bit. The reason I brought up the whole cultural baggage was to show you why some generic 'made in' sticker or whatever other foul compromise won't be sufficient: The reason people care so much about this one specific issue is the cultural dimension it has. I don't expect you to be swayed by my appeals to emotional attachment, but I expect you to recognize them as important to the debate.

[jaked122]

Again, I went over all of this. It does not make white-hat hacking illegal; it makes bypassing technological protections illegal if you do it for financial gain or commercial advantage without consent. That, and it requires an "infringing" act which implies distribution. Just please, read what I posted; I went over all of this already. Also, what TheBiggerFish said- most white-hat hacking goes on with consent which makes all of this moot.

Damn. Your posts are very informative. I am very slightly less apprehensive of it now. I still think that 70 years after death is far too long for a copyright to last, but hey, if they really want the creator of whatever <copyrighted work> to allow his children to make money off their acheivements for their entire natural lives... Still though.

I was speaking specifically of testing software on a system owned by the white hat hacker. Interfering with services is something I can understand being illegal.

[jaked122]

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind the count-down starting at death, rather than at publishing. I don't think it's reasonable to profit for one work for 40-60 years while you're still alive.

[Helgoland]

Parmesan is a specific kind of cheese from a specific region, not just any finely grated hard cheese.

I agree with the first part of that argument but not the second. As long as it is that specific kind of cheese I don't see what difference it could possibly make whether it's produced in Italy or America or Austrailia, or somewhere deep in the Kuiper Belt

Ha, just found a coherent argument against this: Consumers often wish to support the producers because they keep alive the heritage and tradition of the manufacturing process. Buying something is not just a prequesite act for consumption, but always an interaction with the producer and the middle men as well.

[jaked122]

Ha, just found a coherent argument against this: Consumers often wish to support the producers because they keep alive the heritage and tradition of the manufacturing process. Buying something is not just a prequesite act for consumption, but always an interaction with the producer and the middle men as well.

I don't. I just want the thing to be what it says, produced in a fashion that is traditional. Why do I care where it's coming from, or if the company that makes what I call parmesean is really a umpteenth generation farmer working a field that has been worked hundreds of generations before that?

Tradition is silly, and while I understand not wanting large corporations to take control of this sort of thing, I don't think that limiting production to certain regions is the solution.

The only solution is confrontation of the problem, in this case, limiting the size of the corporation and forcing them to split without an overarching parent company that owns both is a better solution than limiting the productivity of the corporation.

[TheBiggerFish]

@jaked:
Yeah, now all we need to do is work antitrust enforcement into these treaties.

[Bauglir]

I don't expect you to be swayed by my appeals to emotional attachment, but I expect you to recognize them as important to the debate.

I mean, I'm not sure what you want, then. Are you saying people's emotional attachments should determine how the law is written? Are you saying that hurt feelings should win a court case?

If you want people to boycott producers that use names you don't agree with, that's certainly fine. I have no objection to you caring about these things, if that's what you're taking issue with. And I'm not merely indifferent, but actively happy, if Italy wants to prohibit non-Italian cheeses from being called "Parmesan" within the borders of Italy, and so on and so forth. And I applaud any other nation that decides it, too, would prefer to be bound by such rules, to the extent that it's a national decision and not one abstracted away into a trade agreement and used as leverage.

I have pretty strict standards about what ought to get enshrined in law; strict enough that many things that do even around here are upsetting. Maybe I shouldn't expect a European with no cultural understanding of America to understand this, but I don't believe that your personal feelings are an inherently sound basis for a law that binds me. But unlike you, I'm not just throwing up my hands about it, and am attempting to explain myself, with the hope that some manner of refutation or counterargument will come along to justify this even being a debate. Your position seems to be "This is wrong, you're wrong, quit being wrong!" And I don't know how you expect me to react to that, considering I've literally been asking this whole time for an argument that isn't that.

If you can't convince me, how can you possibly expect the world at large to be convinced? It's one thing to say, "This is my culture, please respect it and let me live in peace." That's your business. It's another to say, "This is my culture, and that means none of you can live in peace until I'm sure you're respecting it."

As it stands, it's not a debate, it's Europe throwing a diplomatic tantrum and me wondering what the fuss is about. And I still haven't got an answer.

[jaked122]

Well, the Berne Convention has been around since the 1880's, so you have over 100 years worth of arguing to do.

Well... If I argued, even successfully against the points made for this... Convention of law. Then if I failed, then I might profit from the argument I made for longer than I argued about it.

That might be the least useful straw-man argument I've ever made against my own thinking. I'll look into the Berne Convention. I might just not know the justifications for having copyright work this way, and those justifications might actually make sense. I'll find arguments against it before I calcify my opinion on it.

Besides, I don't like the idea of what happened with the "Happy Birthday" song. Luckily that was overturned, because it was ruled that the writers of the song( Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill) had never given the rights to the Warner/Chapel organization.

Also it appears that it was out of copyright for a significant period of time prior to the most recent ruling made upon it.

I tried to formulate an argument against the Berne Convention and found myself making points that were entirely speculation based that do not appear to be supported by current evidence. I don't want copyright to exist forever, that's the best I can do with that argument.

Looking further into it, I see that the argument against copyright as a whole is that it creates artificial scarcity, since it does not deplete finite resources in a meaningful way. Especially with digital technology as it is. There are also questions as to whether copyright has the intended effect of ensuring that authors are paid and recieve work and dues and praise appropriate to the work, however I don't have solid facts on this, and solid facts in such a statement  are necessarily scarce because there hasn't been a switch back out of copyright recently enough to know if older(pre-1900) statistics from countries that had not yet implemented copyright laws are still valid.

In any case, it seems that ownership in general is an issue that has non-linearities in economic behaviour when ownership is enhanced or weakened. Unfortunately, it seems that some groups believe that ownership being what made them wealthy and powerful and allowed them to make changes to the world believe that increasing the hold of their ownership would improve their power further.

@jaked:
Yeah, now all we need to do is work antitrust enforcement into these treaties.

I don't get extra notifications if you don't actually quote me, and that's what I pay attention to in the thread, but thanks for the agreement.

I doubt that there are any in the agreements, as this does seem to favour large corporations fairly singularly.

[Helgoland]

Bauglir: Europe is throwing a diplomatic tantrum, yeah - because there's lots of people here who feel the same way that I do, and there's no way in hell such an agreement can be signed if it destroyes that sort of name protection, which is a big fear around here. I couldn't care less whether Americans call their grated hard cheese Parmesan, or Parmesan-style cheese, or Torgo's Executive Powder, and telling them to switch is like arguing on the internet.
The issue is the following, though: TTIP and the like are pushing for global standardization - which I consider a good thing, by the way - and that means we'll have to make sure that the global standard is acceptable to us. Forcing Americans to label their products slightly differently (and honestly, do Americans really give a shit about whether it says 'Parmesan' or 'Parmesan-style'?) is just a necessary consequence, because the alternative is being forced to remove our name protection at home. It's not a decision that's being 'abstracted away into a trade agreement and used as leverage', it's a collective decision of the European nations to not let this part of our heritage get thrown under the bus. That's what I'm telling you: You don't have to understand, you just have to accept that this is as legitimate a European demand in these negotiations as any other.

[Bauglir]

You'd have to convince me that global standardization of names is inherently good. Unless you want to eradicate all but one language and forge a global monoculture, that's an absurd goal anyway. Without that, forcing a change in American culture isn't a necessary consequence; Ispil mentioned above a perfectly acceptable scheme that would permit Americans to keep calling things what they like and permit Europeans to call things what they like. The alternative is not being forced to remove your name protection at home; it is merely ignoring the lack of name protection abroad. And, yes, because it's a collective decision on the part of Europeans, that's totally fine. It's the idea of American naming conventions being screwed with by treaty that I'm objecting to with that clause, and that only. If you don't really care what we call our mediocre cheese powders, we have no disagreement.

I'm happy to accept that it's a thing Europeans can demand in negotiations. After all, any participant can demand anything at negotiations. That's kind of the point. But I've explicitly been asking for a reason; am I to take it that your answer is, "There isn't one, so quit asking?" If so, that's a bit unsatisfying, but whatever, I guess. You won't be doing much for Europe's reputation to my mind, but oh well. I'll be in the unenviable position of endorsing American corporations for being the sensible ones, but I suppose that is my problem.