OH YEAH? [Citation needed]

Actually, you are totally wrong. The Internet itself was created by people who didn’t care about patenting and often didn’t care about copyright (look up what an “RFC” is). That’s why you can actually hook up machines today without large fuss. Whenever patents appeared, niches got carved, someone sat in them, then died off like a cretin because people actually found out that using free protocols actually routed around this kind of proprietary B.S.

Kinda like IBM’s oversight to lock down their ISA PC architecture. Next step: everyone copies it – huge success. The dumbasses then retried this with the locked-down PS/2. It died a long, cancerous illness as no-one could be bothered.

Every time governments impose restrictions, people find a way around them.

If I may play the proverbial devil’s advocate, the Internet itself was created by people who became fabulously wealthy, often from winning lawsuits against those who violated their patented and/or copyrighted innovations. You cannot escape the reality that some of the greatest works of all time, like Star Wars by George Lucas, were fraught with the very battles against copyright infringers that in YOUR “ideal world” would not have been protected.

Many innovations during the recent century were based on those who fully expected to get fabulously wealthy. Does that lessen the value of these innovations? Under the communist revolution in “Mother Russia” from where my mother escaped during the war, such “greed” was considered as moral turpitude, because in an ideal world, such selfish interests were believed to taint innovations. Of course, while the communist party extolled such “virtues” they quietly kept their greatest scientists in the equivalent of today’s gated communities, as their neighbors, living a Bolsheviks’ lifestyle that motivated many intellectuals to achieve such greatness.

I wish to make it clear that I believe that in respect to freedom, there must be yin and yang. If regulators fail to succeed in silencing the Mises Institute’s radical worldviews, then as the song goes, “it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

As an aside, with the disturbing changes in government you pointed out, don’t be surprised if one day the FBI and other Federal agencies raid the Mises Institute’s offices and place its people under arrest for “sedition” or even “treason.” Are you prepared to suffer martyrdom in the name of Mises? Hopefully, it will never come to that.

His point there is that ACTA “negotiations” are happening mostly in secret and without representative government or civilian input. Freedom of information requests have been turned down because of bogus “national security” reasons but the likes of RIAA and the MPAA have been let in the door. It’s protectionist corporatism as its worst. For something that can have such far reaching impact on peoples lives, the very least they can do is be far more transparent and debate this openly in Congress… dubious that it really has to be discussed at all.

But if ACTA is so moral in your opinion, please tell us why the negotiations are happening in secret?

As for “actual creation”, surely not all creation is done by large organizations and companies. I think you probably know that but your emotion has got the best of you and you’re defending something you have relatively little or no stake in, unless you do, but that would put you in the rent seeker category.

And based on your logic,“simply taking another person’s creation and putting your name on it does not make you an actual creator”, do you mean that Tim Burton’s recent Alice in Wonderland movie or any adaptation of that story since the original isn’t “actually creative”?

The parasitic organizations here are the companies that stand in line waiting for a bailout.