Many people find it ironic when I say that Canada tends to have very little respect for intellectual property.

Hinting on my Russian background, they counter, “Yeah, right, how about this huge Russian torrents website, where you can get pretty much anything you want for free and with impunity?”

Indeed, this may seem like a contradiction at the first sight. However, not really.

While Russia’s piracy rates are huge, I’ve always felt that there the majority of people know that they are doing something wrong when they are downloading other people’s works without authorization. It’s more of an “I’m a bad boy, and I know it” kind of attitude.

Things are different in Canada. Here, the attitude is: It benefits the great majority of the public to have free access to this work, hence it should not be illegal for me to download it, even if the copyright owner protests.”

While taking something that belongs to another without permission is bad enough, I strongly believe that it is much worse to do it under the false pretense that there is nothing wrong with doing it.

It’s bad enough when a bully takes away a toy from a child. It’s much worse when the bully’s parents find a myriad of reasons why it was OK for the bully to do it and why the child should have shared the toy with the bully in the first place.

CIPO offers a very sophisticated trademarks search on its website.

Unfortunately, as with most government websites, the interface is less than user-friendly.

This is why I created my own script that allows you to search for registered trademarks and trademark applications and displays information in a much more visually pleasing way.

Unfortunately, because of how CIPO’s database is designed, my search can only be used for the basic search, not the advanced search.

Feel free to use it. And if you do – please don’t forget to tweet about it!

Of all the IP lawyers I know who are openly advocating for radical changes in the copyright system, William Patry is the only one who is not afraid to dig deep. Instead of founding his arguments upon novel interpretations of some obscure subparagraphs of legislative provisions or dictas in 18th century case law, Patry starts where any meaningful discussion about copyright should start – with the question why, why do we have copyright laws at all.

While I vehemently disagree with his conclusions and proposals, I have tremendous respect for Mr. Patry because, unlike most of those who agree with the substance of his proposals, he openly declares his goals and reasons, not hiding behind some illusory goal of pleasing everybody. It is an honour to have such an opponent in this philosophical debate.

William Patry has recently published his new book, “How to Fix Copyright”. In it he explains why today’s copyright laws make no sense, goes back to the foundations of copyright and asks the inevitable question why, offers an answer to that question and makes several proposals based on that answer.

Ironically, I tend to agree with most of what Patry wrote in his book. A great deal of it is nothing but brilliant and very useful. In fact, I wholeheartedly recommend it to both supporters of “stronger” copyright laws and destroyers of copyright.

As I mentioned, I disagree with Patry’s answer to the why question and, subsequently, to his proposals with respect to how copyright should be fixed. In this review, I will first briefly outline my fundamental disagreements with Mr. Patry and then illustrate them with examples from his book.

 Big problems with Patry’s position

There are several big problems that I see in Patry’s position.

The most important one is that he believes that the reason for existence of copyright laws is to benefit the public the most. I have been saying this for years: copyright laws can only exist for one of two reasons: either they focus on protecting the interests of creators and investors while disregarding the potential consequences for the public; or they focus on protecting the interests of the public while providing to creators and investors the minimal level of protection required to ensure that the public has the most amount of new works to consume.

The idea of balancing these interests is insane, even though it became mainstream. I am well known for comparing it to an attempt to balance the interests of rapists and their victims in a single piece of legislation – it just doesn’t work that way… I will be returning to this metaphor throughout this article. If you feel offended, stop reading.

The reason I respect Patry’s position so much is that he understands that the balance model is nonsensical. The reason I disagree with Patry is that in this resulting dilemma between protecting the public or the creators, he sides with the public.

Patry is in fact advocating for the Soviet model of copyright law where creators had no control over the use of their works and were only entitled to “fair” remuneration. As I wrote in my article, “Copyright and the Great Socialist Degradation”, authors created many great works in the Soviet times. Lack of exclusive right to control the use of one’s works, as Patry rightly notices, does not necessarily cause authors to abstain from creating. The problem with this, of course, is, in the words of Ayn Rand, “the man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave”. By taking away from the copyright owners to right to decide on what terms their works are to be used by the public, we are essentially enslaving them.

Secondly, Patry correctly makes a distinction between what the laws are and what the laws should be (in hid opinion). He understands that in order to get to the a destination, one cannot rely on the laws as they are today. He is not afraid to offer suggestions that go beyond attempts to reinterpret the existing norms. Yes, somehow he draws support from old copyright laws, such as Statute of Anne, when it tends to benefit his position.

I have two issues with this approach. You cannot have it both ways. Either we disregard all existing and past laws in the search of the perfect solution, or we are bound by such existing and past laws. Relying on provisions of the 1710 act as the basis for one’s proposals in 2012 is no more genuine than claiming that whatever laws that are in existence today are the way they should remain for the next 300 years. On the other hand, one should not forget that the Statute of Anne was adopted in the pre-Adam Smith era of capitalism, when individual rights and freedoms meant little and when the laws were but a system of privileges granted to groups and individuals. To look to these laws for guidance as to the fundamental principles of today’s copyright is no more genuine than using slavery laws as the inspiration for today’s employment standards.

Thirdly, while Patry correctly states that law is not the solution to business problems, he at the same time advocates that the new laws he suggests will be a good way to force businesses to adopt “good” business models to replace the awful retrograde business models that copyright owners around the world currently use in reliance on the outdated copyright laws. Again, you cannot have it both ways.

You don’t fix broken business models by stealing from those who attempt to run them. Free markets do a much better job at educating those whose business models are antiquated. As I explained in my article “Failed Business Models of the Past, Eh?”, piracy distorts the markets and prevents businesses relying on traditional copyright models from properly evaluating their viability.

Fourthly, Patry’s proposals are based on the assumption that today’s laws somehow prevent businesses from adopting “good” business models. They don’t. Everyone is free to relinquish control over the use of their works, and many have done so. Just because someone is prepared to give up control does not mean that the right to control should be taken away from others by force. Just because someone may be willing to pay more in taxes does not mean that everybody else should be taxed more. Even is someone (even a great majority) is prepared to sacrifice their firstborns in the name of some “higher” purpose does not mean that those who do not should be forced to do the same.

These are the big points on which we disagree. Below, I will illustrate this with specific examples from Patry’s book.read more…

This is a repost of my article that I co-wrote with Robbie Fleming in April of 2011. It was originally published in The Advocate.

Anyone who is familiar with the internet knows that when you do a search you get some results that are advertising.

The way this works is that an advertiser pays Google to post the advertiser’s ad whenever a particular keyword is searched for. When a user next types that keyword into Google, the advertiser’s ad will be displayed at the top of the search results, or sometimes on the right-hand margin of the page.

Does this mean that you can use your competitor’s brand as a keyword so that customers looking for your competitor will find you first?

Courts in California and British Columbia have both answered this question in the last few months, and have come to very different conclusions.

California Decision

In Binder v. Disability Group, Inc.^1., the plaintiffs and defendants were in competition for US social security disability claimants, whom they both wanted to provide services to. The defendants advertised their services on Google, and some of their chosen keywords were the trademarks of the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs sued for statutory trademark infringement and the common law tort of unfair competition, which is broadly similar to the tort of passing off in Canada.

US District Judge King wrote:

“…there was a strong likelihood of confusion. Plaintiffs’ mark and that used by Defendants [as a keyword] are identical – both are Plaintiffs’ registered trademark of “Binder and Binder”. We find that Plaintiffs’ marks are strong based on testimony that Plaintiffs’ extensively marketed and advertised their services and worked to build their reputation based around their name….

The services provided are identical – both Plaintiffs and Defendants are competing for clients for social security disability cases. Defendants intentionally chose Plaintiffs’ mark based on its strength and appeal in the market. Additionally, both Plaintiffs and Defendants market their products through the Internet and rely upon it to obtain clients.”

The judge found that the infringement of the plaintiffs’ trademarks was a willful violation of the plaintiffs statutory and common law rights, and awarded double damages plus reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs against the defendants.

British Columbia Decision

In Private Career Training Institutions Agency v. Vancouver Career College^2., the BC Court of Appeal considered similar issues.

The plaintiff was the local regulator responsible for private colleges, and passed the following bylaw:

“An institution must not engage in advertising or make a representation that is false, deceptive or misleading. Deceptive advertising includes but is not limited to an oral, written, internet, visual, descriptive or other representation that has the capability, tendency or effect of deceiving or misleading a consumer”.

However, some of the colleges advertised their programs on Google using the names of their competitors as keywords. Just as in the California case, these colleges did not pretend that they were their competitors, but they used their competitors’ brands to direct consumer traffic to their own websites instead.

The BC regulator asked the colleges to stop, and when they refused the regulator went to court for an injunction to force them to stop. Unfortunately for the regulator, Mr. Justice Gaul concluded there was nothing wrong with the use of a competitor’s brand as a keyword:

“I find [the defendant’s] advertising program, including its use of Keyword Advertising that incorporates the names of competitor institutions, was not designed to mislead anyone. The two situations of what the [petitioner] says were students who were deceived by [the defendant’s] advertising are, in my opinion, actually examples of students who made mistakes and it was their own actions or inactions that prompted the errors. Had they been more cautious in their reviews of their search results they would have realized that they were looking at a website of an institution other than the one they were initially seeking.

In my opinion, [the defendant’s] internet advertising strategy provided [two students who actually got misled by the advertisement] with the opportunity to investigate and consider other institutions besides the ones they were looking for. Not only do I find there is nothing wrong with that, I think the option to examine a number of institutions offering similar educational programs is a good one for the consumer.”

Accordingly, Mr. Justice Gaul dismissed the regulator’s application for an injunction.

The Court of Appeal upheld Gaul J.’s decision and found that that there was no reasonable grounds to believe that using a keyword to place one colleges’ website in a higher priority on Google than it would otherwise deserve, “was misleading or likely to mislead”.

The Court of Appeal went out of its way to say that the case was not about trademarks or intellectual property, but if Private Career Training was not about IP it is difficult to see what it was about.

It’s hard to see a difference between the Bylaw’s prohibition on advertising that has the “capability… of deceiving or misleading a consumer” and the common law passing off requirement that a defendant’s conduct creates a “likelihood of confusion” – if anything the test in the Bylaw appears less stringent than the common law.

The essence of an action for trademark infringement or passing off is free riding on the goodwill or reputation of another. While in a classic case a defendant is found to be passing off if he is claiming that his goods are the plaintiff’s, in recent years courts have expanded this concept to include more imaginative attempts to exploit someone else’s good reputation. So an Irish distiller cannot claim to be making “scotch whiskey”, and one video store cannot put a competitor’s sign on the highway in order to divert traffic to themselves.

This latter situation was considered by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Brookfield Communications Inc. v. West Coast Entertainment Corp.^3.:

“Using another’s trademark in one’s metatags is much like posting a sign with another’s trademark in front of one’s store. Suppose West Coast’s competitor (let’s call it “Blockbuster”) puts up a billboard on a highway reading – “West Coast Video: 2 miles ahead at Exit 7” – where West Coast is really located at Exit 8 but Blockbuster is located at Exit 7. Customers looking for West Coast’s store will pull off at Exit 7 and drive around looking for it. Unable to locate West Coast, but seeing the Blockbuster store right by the highway entrance, they may simply rent there. Even consumers who prefer West Coast may find it not worth the trouble to continue searching for West Coast since there is a Blockbuster right there. Customers are not confused in the narrow sense: they are fully aware that they are purchasing from Blockbuster and they have no reason to believe that Blockbuster is related to, or in any way sponsored by, West Coast. Nevertheless, the fact that there is only initial consumer confusion does not alter the fact that Blockbuster would be misappropriating West Coast’s acquired goodwill.”

In Private Career Training, Mr. Justice Gaul concluded that the accused colleges did not use their competitor’s name in their metatags, but it is difficult to see how using the brands in Google adwords is any different – both are tools in which the power of a competitor’s brand is used against it to steer consumer traffic away from the competitor and on to the advertiser’s competing site.

Both Mr. Justice Gaul and the Court of Appeal in Private Career Training concluded that no consumer was ultimately mislead by the use of brands as keywords, because the offending colleges did not pretend to be anything other than themselves in either their ads or their websites, and so any reasonably intelligent consumer clicking on the ‘wrong’ website would have eventually discovered their mistake:

“… the decision to spend thousands of dollars and several years on a course of education was very important. It was reasonable to expect that potential students would approach the issue with some care.”

But this analysis presumes that end point is the only relevant point of analysis. It ignores the fact that the offending colleges were using their competitor’s brand as a springboard to direct initial inquiries to themselves (“initial interest confusion” as in Brookfield), and it also appears inconsistent with the common law passing off likelihood of confusion test, as formulated in Veuve Clicquot^4.:

“The test to be applied is a matter of first impression in the mind of a casual consumer somewhat in a hurry who sees the name Cliquot on the respondents’ storefront or invoice, at a time when he or she has no more than an imperfect recollection of the VEUVE CLICQUOT trade-marks, and does not pause to give the matter any detailed consideration or scrutiny, nor to examine closely the similarities and differences between the marks.”

Of course the courts in Private Career Training were not considering trademark infringement but the application of consumer protection legislation, and with this idea firmly in mind the Court of Appeal concluded that trademark principles were irrelevant to their analysis.

In fairness to the Court of Appeal, consumer protection legislation has a different purpose than intellectual property laws. IP protects the rights of the intellectual property owners, and so concepts like initial interest confusion matter because any free riding on a business’ brand matters. But consumer protection laws are mostly about final effects – will any consumer be harmed? From this perspective the Court of Appeal’s focus on the final impact of the use of the brand keywords instead of the initial impact is more understandable. However, even this distinction is questionable because of the authority in Canada that consumer protection is one of the fundamental purposes of the tort of passing off: Ciba-Geigy Canada v. Apotex [1992] SCJ 83 at paras 48 to 50.

In any event, whether Private Career Training is about intellectual property or consumer protection is not as significant as the fact that it is the first case in Canada to consider the use of brands in keyword advertising. Because it is the first, and because of its conclusion, this case will be seen by many as an invitation to challenge well established incumbents in the market place by bidding on those incumbents’ own brands on Google adwords. The stronger those brands, the more vulnerable they will be to internet-savvy competitors entering their markets without any brand power of their own.

This is a repost of my article that I published at MINCOV.COM on June 23, 2010.

As negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) progress and more and more information becomes available on the potential wording of the agreement, the usual suspects from all camps are happy to share their views on how ACTA might influence our lives. Quite expectedly, the opinions range from alarmist to pacifying, from wholly positive to Armageddonist, from neutral with a tint of “it’s not going far enough” to neutral with a “they’re still not gonna get us” tongue-in-cheek attitude.

How is it possible that one and the same document can attract such radically differing opinions from indisputably educated and intelligent people? The answer is simple. No assessment of a draft international agreement (or any piece of legislation) is possible in abstraction from the values against which such agreement is to be gauged by the assessor.

This is the reason why any legislation regulating welfare handouts is usually subject to heated debates: the same piece of legislation would necessarily receive incompatible ratings from human rights activists, union leaders, free market economists, those who are to distribute the handouts, the homeless, the working poor or the uber-rich. This happens because everyone has their own system of values, however consistent, and it is through the prism of these values that one evaluates all existing or proposed rules.

It is one’s system of values that allows one to rank various interests in the order of their importance. What is more important – saving a life of someone else’s child or the ability to buy a new toy for one’s own child; establishing higher wages for auto workers at the expense of car buyers or bringing down car prices at the expense of auto workers’ wages; saving an unbeknown species at the expense of a local industry or the prosperity of the industry workers – even if it means extinction of the species; protecting the rights of authors in a way that may result in severe limitations of availability of certain works or protecting the “rights” of “the public” to a rich cultural life at the expense of creators’ freedom to dictate the terms of use of their works?

The answer to all of these questions is – it depends. It depends on the system of values of the person who is to answer these questions. Any attempt to convince others in the “objective rightness” of one’s answers is nothing more than an attempt to inculcate or force one’s system of values upon others. An attempt to find a compromise under the guise of objectivity is either a reflection of one’s subjective system of values or an attempt to shift the Overton window^1. so that one of the conflicting values is marginalized as “too much” and the other one gains weight as the window slowly shifts in its direction. I have already provided one Ayn Rand’s quote about the compromise between food and poison in my recent article, Modernization of the Inconceivable. Here is another one:

“The good has nothing to gain from … the evil, except a share of its failures and crimes; the [evil] has everything to gain from the [good]: a share of its achievements and values. An industrialist does not need the help of a burglar in order to succeed; a burglar needs the industrialist’s achievement in order to exist at all. What collaboration is possible between them and to what end?”^2..

In the beginning, I had no reservations about ACTA, other than that it would probably not go far enough in establishing a system that would provide an efficient mechanism of enforcement against mass violations of copyright on the Internet. I had no problem dismissing most comments from scholars known for their focus on the so called “user rights” – simply because they are based on the system of values that is irreconcilable with mine.

However, after I spent some time getting myself familiar with various opinions on ACTA, I realized that the one problem I do have with ACTA is that it can be used as a tool to set up global regulation of the Internet going far beyond the framework against copyright infringements.

The idea that the international agreement that seemingly could provide enhanced level of protection to copyright owners whose works are being used on the Internet could also become a tool of oppression (and by oppression I do not mean one’s inability to download a new movie free of charge), seemed like an irreconcilable contradiction. Then again, Ayn Rand’s philosophy came to the rescue. In “Atlas Shrugged”, she wrote: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”

This is exactly what I did.

Let me start with setting up the framework of my system of values and beliefs in this regard.

1. Individual rights are an absolute priority. A society that does not fully protect individual rights is a society of masters (whether the master is a dictator or the majority) and slaves.

a. Individual rights are impossible without property.

b. Intellectual property, as a result of one’s creative labour, is no less property than any other type of property.

c. Unlike in the case of tangible property, there is no way to physically prevent infringement of intellectual property.

d. If the infringement of intellectual property does occur and is not voluntarily remedied by the violator, the only recourse the owner of the intellectual property may have against the violator would be through the use of coercive force applied towards the violator – which may either be the force applied by the state (through courts and various enforcement procedures) or by the owner of the intellectual property and its agents (i.e. thugs or journalists).

2. The government’s only proper roles are those designed to protect individual rights through monopoly use of coercive force, i.e. the military, the police and the courts.

a. More government involvement and regulations based on protection of interests of some people or groups at the expense of some others means less freedom to all but the ruling clique.

b. Individual rights cannot be voted away by the majority, no matter how overwhelming.

c. Totalitarianism is totalitarianism, regardless of any allegedly virtuous purposes for which it is being instituted. The state does not have to be run by a murderous dictator for the individuals in that society to not be free. What distinguishes totalitarianism (as the ultimate form of statism) from a free society is that it holds a mortgage on its subjects’ property and lives by sacrificing them to a mysterious common good. The difference between a mixed economy and full totalitarianism is only a difference of degree in lack of freedom. Laissez-faire capitalism, with its recognition of individual rights as the ultimate virtue, is the only truly moral politico-economic system that does not sacrifice, under the barrel of the gun of the government’s enforcement machine, the rights of individuals to the interests of others (be it the dictator, a bureaucrat, a particular group in the society, or the “public” in general).

d. While a big government involved in roles improper for the government is bad enough, a global government is disastrous.

3. Given the ease of dissemination of unauthorized content on the Internet and impracticality of initiating a full-blown litigation over each case of infringement, the only sensible solution, if we are to deal with Internet piracy, is through cooperation of ISPs (both hosting providers and Internet connectivity providers).

4. To create a truly totalitarian state or a global government today, the Internet would necessarily need to be heavily regulated, hence the attempts to force net neutrality down our throats.

a. No totalitarian state has existed without drastically limiting freedom of speech or without serious invasion of private lives of the state’s subjects.

b. A system that allows to control ISPs for the purpose of enforcing intellectual property rights can easily be used to impose overreaching control over the Internet.

5. Internet, as any great invention, can be used for good purposes and for bad purposes. Regulation of the Internet can also be done for good and evil purposes.

6. Ends do not justify the means. It is impossible to save the free market system by abandoning free market principles, President George W. Bush to the contrary notwithstanding^1..

So why does there seem to be a contradiction? Those who have read my article, Modernization of the Inconceivable, might have already figured it out. The main problem with ACTA is that it is based on a compromise of underlying principles. Just as a legislative attempt to balance interests of factory owners with those of looters who openly steal from the factory, is nothing more than institutionalized racketeering, an attempt to appease those who claim that they are entitled to “share” the cultural legacy by downloading, without authorization, any packages of ones and zeros, is nothing more than enslavement of creators (and those with whom creators voluntarily trade) by forcing them to give up the product of their labour and investment on terms that are dictated by someone else.

Until the proposed international agreement clearly states that the protection of intellectual property, as its underlying principle, is undertaken for the benefit of whose who create it and invest in it and that it has nothing to do with the interests of the whole “society”, we are doomed to witness the war between various groups lobbying their interests. When the use of one’s property is subjected to undefined interests of the “society”, one is neither the owner nor a free man. If a person is only allowed to have a private home if the society finds it beneficial, then under the same logic, the society can always expropriate the house, if it should find, through an activist claiming to represent the interests of the society, that expropriation would benefit the society even more. This is precisely what happened in the Soviet Russia where if the place you lived at was more spaceous than 9 sq. meters (97 sq. feet) per person, you were considered too rich and the government had the right to let strangers into your “communal” apartment. When it is up to the society (through its elected or self proclaimed representatives) to decide who should own what, one is merely a slave whose property can be taken away at any time in order to meet the demand of the public.

As long as the mechanics of the proposed agreement are designed with the interests of the collective in mind, there will always remain a risk that the enforcement tools created by the agreement will be used for unrelated purposes that are, as will be claimed, equally as important to the society. If even a partial justification for establishing the rules for ISP liability is that it would promote the public interest in the encouragement and dissemination of works of art^2., then there is no reason not to use the same system of ISP liability with respect to dissemination of extremist speech, the definition of extremism being, naturally, left to the discretion of anybody who will claim that shutting down of a particular opposing view is in the interests of the country.

That is the problem with the current wording of ACTA, not that lobbyists from the recording industry cannot come to terms with lobbyists from the electronic gadgets industry; or that both these groups are vehemently opposed by activists of the “masses are (or should be) entitled to use copyrighted works as they please” movement. The problem is that because ACTA does not clearly establish the notion that the only concern for protection of intellectual property is the creator and subsequent voluntary investors in the creator’s work, the treaty members are not precluded from approaching the issue of such protection from the perspective of the “common good”, thus allowing a dubious compromise between two conflicting philosophies.

That ACTA has more chances of being implemented in the world because of its wording being vague enough to accommodate irreconcilable interpretations, is not good enough. If one scholar says that ACTA establishes a three-strikes-you’re-out rule and another scholar says that all it does is that it confirms contributory liability of ISPs, which liability is lifted subject to the ISP’s reasonable cooperation, it means that the same text may equally reasonably be interpreted as providing a global government with a tool of shutting off dissent and establishing total control over who does what on the Internet. What is attempted to be sold as a virtue of ACTA, that it offers a balanced approach to various groups of interests, is precisely its most important flaw.

As soon as the treaty’s purpose becomes to establish a fair balance of interests (based on whichever group succeeds at extorting favours from the drafters and other parties), the implementation of the treaty would always lie in the domain of re-evaluation of what balance is “fair” under the circumstances (the circumstances being, of course, the relative power of various interest groups in a particular country at a particular time). This is nothing more than warfare between various gangs as to which one of them has more power over the others.

Those who understand the importance of intellectual property should not lull themselves into believing that everything is going their way simply because lobbyists from their camp succeeded at squeezing in a rule that would tip the balance in their favour. As long as the protection is not based on a morally consistent principle, there is no guarantee that the balance will not tip the other way tomorrow or that the enforcement mechanism created by ACTA is not used for purposes radically different from those that it will have been introduced for.

The only way to ensure that an international treaty provides a solution to combat Internet piracy without becoming a tool of oppression is to so word the treaty that it would not leave any doubt as to the reasons why intellectual property is granted protection. And that reason should be stated clearly and proudly – intellectual property is being protected because no one has a right to use the results of another’s creative labour, other than on terms put forward by the creator or the subsequent copyright owner who voluntarily purchases said rights from the creator. It has nothing to do with whether the society benefits from such protection.

Unless the collective interest is left out of the equation, there will always remain a risk of this collective interest being used to enslave everyone into submission to whoever claims to be the representative of the society at any given moment. This is precisely the way all collectivist dictatorships of the past have seized power. It should not be forgotten that no dictator has come to power on the promises to murder millions of citizens in their own country. All the atrocities of collectivist regimes (be it Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Khmers Rouges, Che or other blood-thirsty monsters) that are presently being laundered by the left, have been accomplished in the name of the common good.

I am not saying that ACTA will necessarily lead to the world holocaust. What I am saying is that the lack of clarity in the reasons for its adoption would make both IP supporters and haters guilty in the demise of our freedoms. The difference, however, is that the haters’ goal is clear – they openly advocate for the submission of creators and investors to the interests of the “society”. It is the position of many IP supporters that is most inglorious: by trying to carve out a piece of the pie for creators, they are prepared to do away with the philosophical basis for the protection. By throwing the creators to the mercy of the collective, even if it benefits the creators in the short run, all that they are achieving is that the paradigm slowly shifts to the one that IP haters embrace – that there should be no protection other than that which benefits the society as a whole.