Yay for the other side?

[jducoeur]

I'm far enough on my blog-reading that I only just got up to this article about the state of the ACTA treaty. On the one hand, this seems to be broadly good news: the new international intellectual property treaty isn't going to be nearly as stupid as it first looked.

OTOH, as someone who considers himself very patriotic (even a bit chauvanistic sometimes), it sticks in my craw to recognize that the improvements to the treaty are mostly because the US stopped being quite so obstinate and stupid. Far as I can tell, we avoided total legal foolishness mainly because the European Parliament (among others) stood up and said, "no way". In this fight, pretty much from the start, the US were the bad guys.

OTOOH, it's at least a bit encouraging to know that the current administration is *able* to back down when everyone else tells them that they're screwing up. I may be annoyed that they were pushing the wrong side of the argument, but at least they didn't push it very hard.

So here's a cheer for the European Parliament and their allies, who have given the IP Absolutists a well-deserved black eye, and a sigh of relief for foolishness averted...

Comments

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's worse. It happened because we are increasingly less relevant as trading partners. EU, Japan, Mexico, BRIC, all of them stood up to the U.S. on different issues which is what prompted the U.S. to finally take my advice in this video and "drop the crazy stuff."

And Michael Geist deserves huge props for publicizing this and helping enable coordination by civil society orgs internationally.