Croatian president openly supports ACTA
Ivo Josipović displayed a wide variety of ignorance a few days ago when he openly spoke about ACTA as a good thing. Although he obviously supports the ACTA agreement and speaks about it at great length, one can get the impression that mister president didn’t read it very caref at all.
While comparing piracy to stealing from a supermarket and trying to compare digital information to groceries, he said that ACTA maybe could be exploitable for surveillance and intruding privacy , but that he believes it won’t be.
Since ACTA itself cannot function without intruding privacy and constant monitoring of everything we do online (and offline?), it’s probable that Josipović doesn’t really have a firm grasp of what ACTA is and what it says. I won’t disagree that the ACTA agreement is a convoluted document written to confuse and hide its obvious fascist agenda, but Josipović did study law and shouldn’t have any problems with understanding it. But that would actually require some reading, I guess.
Croatia already sports a blank media tax protecting the (un)intellectual property of Croatian singers and artists which was also introduced by Josipović, unlike the displayed ignorance about the subject. He speaks of some elusive group of people called “the pirates” who lie about ACTA to protect themselves and it all sounds like a big fairy tale he’s trying to sell to the public while hiding his ignorance.
I am aware that sometimes piracy can be hurtful (although it’s not really hard proven), but it could also be a very valuable tool if people realized that the world of marketing changed and that the Interwebz are not the enemy. (for example, check this out).
Even if piracy was the biggest problem on the planet, it still doesn’t give anyone the right to censor the whole Internet and disregard any leftovers of privacy and free speech we might still have.
