[LINK] Proposal for International Law Enforcement

[David Boxall]

11:28 AM 6/12/2008 Craig Sanders wrote:
>  ... it makes a mockery of national sovereignty. e.g. reverse
>  engineering is perfectly legal in some countries, and illegal in
>  others. whose law prevails?
What makes you think that nation states (and therefore national laws) 
will endure, any more than city states have?

At 11:49 AM 6/12/2008, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>  ... If the measure by which the decision was made as to whose law won
>  out was based on population, China's would. So that's probably not a
>  good measure. The bigger concern is that this approach -- that is an
>  international cop, to put it in common terms -- for this particular
>  issue is that the concept would be extended to other areas of the law
>  without a governance structure to control it. There is no world
>  'government'.
There is no world government, granted, but something along those lines 
is probably inevitable.  Unfortunately, I probably won't live long 
enough to see the forms government and law take as nation states merge.

At 12:03 PM 6/12/2008, Janet Hawtin wrote:
>  ... both state and federal laws are decided by some kind of
>  democratic process and overview, whereas WIPO is strongly lobbied by
>  business interests
I wonder how a democracy of six billion people could operate.  There'd 
be plenty of resources for process & overview, but might it bog down 
under its own weight?  Would commercial interests grow overwhelmingly 
large and influential or would their lobbying efforts be overwhelmed by 
the sheer size of the political environment?

>  I think that access to information and permission to change and
>  comment on information is a core part of a democracy
That is where the Internet comes into its own.  It's why any attempt to 
interfere with the free flow of information must be resisted.
 
-- 
David Boxall                         | "Cheer up" they said.
                                     | "Things could be worse."
                                     | So I cheered up and,
                                     | Sure enough, things got worse.
                                     |              --Murphy's musing