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."
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