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EU Legal Review Agrees With US: ACTA Dreadfully Written; Wide Open To Interpretation
from the this-is-not-a-good-thing dept
Earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) did a legal review of ACTA to see if it conformed with existing US law. While the USTR tried to keep the report buried, it eventually came out -- and basically said that ACTA was drafted in a dreadfully confusing and opaque way. The issue? It's not even clear if US law conforms to ACTA, because ACTA can be interpreted in many different ways -- some of which suggest the US is in compliance, and some of which say we're not.
The EU Parliament's legal service recently conducted a similar review and came to an identical conclusion: ACTA may or may not be legal... depending on how you interpret it.
This should be seen as a massive problem. When you're crafting a giant international agreement that is binding on various countries (and, yes, the US pretends it's not binding, but the other signers insist it is binding, meaning under international law, they likely can hold the US to a claim that it's binding), the fact that it's so vague that what is and what is not legal under it is totally wide open to interpretation means you've drafted a really bad agreement that shouldn't be approved. In the meantime, any country signing such a document should be ashamed of itself, because it doesn't even know what it's bound itself to.
The EU Parliament's legal service recently conducted a similar review and came to an identical conclusion: ACTA may or may not be legal... depending on how you interpret it.
This should be seen as a massive problem. When you're crafting a giant international agreement that is binding on various countries (and, yes, the US pretends it's not binding, but the other signers insist it is binding, meaning under international law, they likely can hold the US to a claim that it's binding), the fact that it's so vague that what is and what is not legal under it is totally wide open to interpretation means you've drafted a really bad agreement that shouldn't be approved. In the meantime, any country signing such a document should be ashamed of itself, because it doesn't even know what it's bound itself to.
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Politics and the internet
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Carte Blanche
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Re: Politics and the internet
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What does it say in English? :)
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After all, it shifts responsibility to judges, so if you're a politician who voted for the treaty, and judges do something that your voters don't like when ruling on ACTA then you can just attack the judges for being activists, and promise to replace them with strict constructionists when they retire. It works real well for raising money from the anti-abortion crowd in the USA.
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Re: Re: Politics and the internet
Oh... wait... shit.
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Re: Re: Politics and the internet
Yup. And in Australia. Our bureaucrats are either sleepwalking or there is some devious plan afoot. History suggests that they do not do devious at all well.
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If they get ACTA
And all cases involving someone being accused of being a jerk must have a jury.
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Legality..
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Worse than that, they'll interpret it one way to get it passed, and another way after it's law.
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Re: ACTA uses Confusion....It's SUPER-Effective
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Does that mean they should stop writing laws? Perhaps just stop trying? This is the conclusion you seem to suggest, and it just doesn't make sense.
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How you come to that conclusion without massive misinterpretation is beyond my understanding. Care to explain to the class where he intimated that we should stop writing laws?
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Oh, they know!
You see it as binding us, a politician sees it as a way of making any laws they want afterwards, they can just say that we already promised.
Especially the EU-countries are very good at using EU as a shield against backlashes for the laws they make.
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ACs logic does work, if you assume that all laws, or at least a big portion of them, can be interpreted as being illegal. That's the big hole in the argument.
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Just another sign of big money corruption and Washington.
PROTEST CORRUPTION and do some OCCUPY !!
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You can look at the original COPA law, which was enjoined from enforcement in 1998, and found finally in 2007 to be "facially in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution" (thanks wikipedia).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act
There are tons of laws written that don't past the test of the courts. You can look at many of the immigration laws on the State level, handgun restrictions, and things like that.
The legality of almost any law depends on how it is read, and how it is interpreted by enforcement and then the courts.
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Yes. A thousand times yes. I want all new laws to have sunset clauses so that they don't have time to write new laws because they'll always be debating the old ones.
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No, it means that they should stop writing corrupt laws.
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Re: Re: Re: Politics and the internet
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I'm shocked and appalled
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Could you not say that about the Constitution of the US also?
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The problem is that it didn't have an easy way to update it while banning changing some portions of it (such as the Bill of Rights) to take into account the exponential increase in technology.
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