After writing some letters to Dutch MEP's (European Parliament members in commission ITRE) about anti counterfeit trade agreement ACTA I got a call from one of them, MEP Auke Zijlstra. To my surprise! The letter started with my own experience:
"Many years of my professional life I spent on product development - from machines for microelectronics to trains. All those years my fellow technicians and I were examining competitors' products very well. We investigated how things were built in order to imitate it - but in an improved form. By the way, the competitors also did that with our products. These practices can be labeled as copycatting and stealing but for us it was education and the basis for creating the best products and to compete. Companies that only imitate go bankrupt but companies who imitate and innovate will survive on the market. For that reason imitation - call it counterfeiting - is an important foundation in virtually every manufacturing company - and hence the economy. Those obstructing imitation are demolishing our economic foundation - and that is exactly what the anti counterfeit trade agreement ACTA does and that is what makes ACTA loathsome."
MEP Zijlstra told me that he didn't hear of this argument before and found it a very solid argument - he is definite against ACTA and gets a lot of mail from people who are concerned too. Now these people often come up with arguments about downloading and that argument is probably very clear for all MEP's involved.
In my opinion the argument 'ACTA is killing competition and the economy' is the very main reason to stop this insane 'agreement'. The second paragraph of the letter explains it:
"But there's more. Free - but tough - competition means that companies can only survive by offering the best products at the lowest price on the market. However, the organizations behind ACTA do not have to compete based on price and quality: they use copyright, patent and trademark to kill the hard needed competition. The consequences affect us all: we pay far too much for medicines, we prohibit production of life-saving AIDS medicines with patents while two million AIDS patients die each year and finally we pay way too much for software, movies and music. Despite downloading the financial reports of these organizations prove you can earn an extreme amount of money if you don't have to compete in a tough way. The situation is out of balance and ACTA makes this even worse."
We should be more aware of the fact that most MEP's don't have experience on the dirty working floor. Instead they often have an academic degree and worked in management functions. That results in two problems. The first is that these people do not know very well what is best practice on the working floor making development (stealing ideas...) an abstract process. So someone has to tell them and you should do it too if you have other convincing arguments. For example, I am missing arguments from musicians who are generally only getting crumbs from the copyright cake. Academic writers ditto. The second problem is that MEP's are too neutral: When the patent and copyright junkies come with their tear jerking stories they are also open minded to their arguments. These junkies are professional lobbyists so they know very well how to package their message. It is their arguments that must be countered - and that is relative easy because most MEP's tend to raise the interests of citizens and SME's above the interests of the suits. But it must be done!
