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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

This couldn't have happened to nicer people. Every time the MPPA/RIAA lose big a thousand kittens die and another lobbyist pushes for another draconian copyright law over a dinner table at a $10,000 per head benefit dinner. While it might feel like we've had a few wins lately with ACTA and whatnot, this is only the beginning the stupidity of the entertainment industry will never cease, more laws will be proposed and eventually I believe one of them will get through and once we get one law it opens up the floodgates for more bad laws, don't you just love the world?

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With each law they fail to get through (And rile up a public policy shitstorm over.) the chances of them getting the next one through go down.

Rejecting the ACTA treaty with such an overwhelming majority definitely pushed their plans of passing the TPP (ACTA's successor) treaty at least 2 years back. And it may even have put doubts in their minds about that their strategy so far and if it's still the best one to go.

I think the most important part is the idea that it is creating opponents elsewhere.

E.g. manufacturers that badly wanted the relatively non-controversial anti-counterfeiting measures in ACTA must now be furious at all the lost effort and the years wasted because of issues largely unrelated to their own concerns.

If more and more of these companies see RIAA and MPAA's lobbying as increasingly a threat to their own interests, it is going to have very interesting effects.

We should not forget that ACTA was not just terrible concerning Films and Music. It was botched on a much larger level. Like "protecting" poor people in third world countries from fake medicines... that could be harmful to them... but actually are just generic version of over-protected medicines sold for a fortune by richer countries, and works just fine at a much lower cost.

So even without the article 27, it should have been stricken down (with small exceptions like brand protection etc). Let's not have a fight just to save what concerns us most directly, but for a new conception of copyright, patents and the entire intellectual property landscape.

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