Australia goes cold on ACTA

Great... but still not good enough...

Deferral will be seen by some politicians as meaning "Lets get a new committee together to see if we can sneak it past some other way..."

ACTA needs to be killed stone dead! Deferral does not mean dead and buried...

Remember Harold Holt

The Aussie Prime Minister who started to have doubts about the Vietnam war... Missing without trace while scuba diving... Largely missing from the history books, too...

Sadly

"Nobody else likes it so we don't either," doesn't inspire confidence.

The smart would kill ACTA now and learn...

...that the world may not have objected to all of the parts of ACTA, however take note of:

* Attempts to criminalise copyright infringement is unlikely to go down well. Ripping off a movie is a world apart from rape, murder, arson, etc. A PM that criminalises a good portion of his populace will probably not have office for long regardless of the legality of those people's actions. It is called measured response.

* Especially when other parties are pushing for an orphan works all-you-can-eat-for-free.

* No matter how good or bad ACTA might have been (yes, past tense), its manner of being debated outside of public scrutiny and legal loopholes to prevent, say, referendum or such mean it is rank. Countries with pretences of democracy have learned in a hurry that we expect a certain amount of shit from politicians, but this is crossing the line in fifth gear and pedal to the floor (and to pile on the clichés, a "bridge out" sign).

Point of order

I do not know of a single democratic government anywhere. All the ones I can think of are Republics (elected leaders), not democratic (everyone votes on the issues).

ppau

The pirate party AU has been submitting information to point out exactly the problems with ACTA to comittees involved. It is good to see that we are now giving it a proper evaluation (even though this should have been done years ago, when it was first introduced).

Unfortunately, we also have the TPPA which is too similar for comfort, and most people dont even know about it.

Time to get proactive

It is time to get proactive. Rather than wait for the tiny number of powerful individuals who benefit by stealing the wealth of the commons, we need to mount our own effort to have radical copyright and patent reform to roll it way, way back from where these weasels have brought it to.

From the complete shredding of the U.S. Constitution in recent years, it would appear that language has to be absolutely crystal clear and that Citizens need to be fully educated as to their rights. They need to be entirely empowered to form Grand Juries, reverse law with Jury nullification, etc.

Bad Supreme Court Justices should be removed.

As far as I am concerned, the entire body of copyright and patent law has no moral authority whatsoever. An enlightened and empowered citizenry would never allow things to get so far out of hand.

We need to seize back control of our governments. We need to create mechanisms that punish the perpetrators of these assaults on the body politic. Those punishments should hit them where it hurts most by reducing their financial assets and hobbling their rights so they cannot recover to fight again.

Authority originates with us, not with them. It is unbelievable how bad all this monstrous stuff has become. For people who have been around for a long time, Nineteen Eighty-Four is looking less and less like a dystopic vision and more and more like a routine civics lesson.

Believe it or not, many of the elected representatives are not really the culprits. They *also* do battle against this creeping takeover. It is very difficult for an elected representative with modest personal resources and a limited tenure in office to do battle with immortal corporations and very long-lived cabals who have created entrenched and entitled bureaucrats and waged lobbying campaigns to mangle our laws for decades and even centuries. They need *your* help.

Here is something that would pull the rats out of the woodwork: have a campaign of rolling boycotts of the worst offenders in major sectors of the economy. One week, the word spreads and we target one of the banks for a certain day and have everyone shift their money elsewhere. Do it so it is set up far and wide through a series of grassroots agreements so that pulling the trigger delivers a fatal blow to the targeted entity. Can most of a country last a week or two without directing funds to major corporations? I think so. If very large numbers of people basically put it to major players in the telecoms industry, for instance, that they would all move to whoever offered the better deal for the next six months, one of them would blink. Sure, they have cartel agreements, but these people are backstabbing weasels and they all they are. They will cheat, as always, but this time it will be against each other instead of us.

The people have the power. They have always had it. They don't use it very often, but maybe they should while they still can.