I figured it that as far as the reactions in this thread goes, and I'll guess I have to be more careful how to choose my words. Not everyone like us Germans are anti-Patriotics and anationalists.

Seriously, calm down and try reading some facts before you go off like a ranting twit. I hate to break this to you, but Germany's negotiators in ACTA haven't been standing off to the side as some lone voice against the agreement, either.

I know that, after all we had(still have him) a ministre who wanted to legalize STASI again.
I rage as much about the EU as about the USA.

And yet your initial post starting this whole thread was "America alone is to blame!"??

Because they legetimized first as the confidented document proves.

However, they aren't alone in supporting it and negotiating for it, are they? The identity of the originator of a treaty is a lot less meaningful than who is still negotiating for it, and in this case the US, Canada and Europe are ALL knee deep in this.

Supply and demand exist under every economic system, and how economic systems deal with the questions of supply and demand is what defines them. Capitalism approaches the situation by stating that the resources for which there is supply and demand should be privately owned, and that the unhindered free exchange of such resources will lead to their most efficient distribution as a result of everyone involved looking out for their own self-interest. However, to understand how copyright fits into this (or rather doesn't fit in), one has to go to an even more basic level than different economic systems and ask just what supply and demand actually is, and where the concept comes from. The entire concept of supply and demand is predicated upon the scarcity of resources- unless a resource has some degree of scarcity to it the supply is effectively infinite and the entire concept of supply and demand ceases to apply (and consequently the concept of ownership also ceases to apply in any meaningful way). For example, the supply of both air and sunlight are, for all intents and purposes, infinite at the moment, thus these resources are not addressed in any economic system, and if anyone were to claim they "owned" some supply of air or sunlight they would simply be given funny looks. Water is an interesting and instructive edge case here; historically regions that had an ample supply of water had no concept of ownership of water, while in more arid regions water was a fairly precious commodity to be owned and traded accordingly. More recently as the supply of water both for farming and consumption became more and more taxed we saw the concept of water rights and the ownership of such rights become nearly ubiquitous.
Now, let's apply all of this to the concept of intellectual property. Scarcity does apply here, but only to the initial creation of an idea or work. Designing a new invention or creating a new piece of art is something that not everyone can do, and not something that can necessarily be done easily, and hence a new invention or creative work is scarce, and thus supply and demand applies and such things can be dealt with by economic systems quite easily and naturally. However, once the initial idea or work is public, duplicating it requires next to no resources or effort- there is no scarcity when it comes to copies, thus trying to speak of such things in terms supply and demand or economic systems is nonsensical. Copyright acts by creating artificial scarcity of copies so that economic systems then become applicable to these copies. Copyright is not a principle of capitalism, or socialism, or any kind of economic system, rather it's basically a kludge to make economic systems applicable to something that would otherwise be outside of their purview. There may be justifications for employing such a kludge, but they are not economic justifications, and have nothing to do with ownership or supply and demand.
I didn't address it because it was nonsensical. It was a statement born from lack of a firm conception of what ownership is and where it comes from, what capitalism, socialism, and even anarchy are and the various concepts they are predicated upon. It's akin to the navel-gazing college stupids who pose then posit pithy answers to "What is the meaning of life?" without even having any clear conception of what they even mean by "meaning" or "life." Take the time to get a firm grasp of the basics before you think yourself capable of posing simple explanations and solutions to complex issues.
You are never required to give away any idea or work that you create. But not being required to give it away is not what you're asking for. You're asking for the public to make it viable to trade copies of that idea or work within an economic system by imposing artificial scarcity. Within a capitalist system you can own something that has a limited supply and attempt to trade it for other limited resources, but you are given no guarantee of a resource being economically viable, on either the supply or demand side of the equation. If there is no demand for something you own you cannot sell it. If there is an infinite supply of something then "ownership" of a bit of it is meaningless. These principles apply to all economic systems, not just capitalism. Asking that these inherent principles be changed simply so that you can make money off of something that otherwise wouldn't be economically viable doesn't make you a capitalist, it just makes you a greedy twat. There may very well be some good reasons to impose artificial scarcity in certain cases (and I think that there are indeed some good reasons), but asking that it be done simply for your personal gain simply doesn't cut it.

I agree with you up until you start telling me that a person is not allowed to own what they themselves create. Why would anyone invest the time and effort into novels, artwork, game design, and such if they cannot make a living doing so? This is why there must be copyrights; this is ownership over each person's intellectual capital (of which Intellectual property is a subset). Without it, there is no incentive to put in the effort the create the work for many, if not most, people. You may call it greediness, but I call it 'not starving'.
A copyright to me is telling people that read a novel (for instance), that they have the right to use the work, as long as they aren't going to copy it or reproduce it without my permission (trading it around is actually legal). You call this creating artificial scarcity, but I call this protecting the ownership of the work. Without the ownership of a good, such as intellectual capital, there is no capitalism. Period.
So, in your first reply to me in the thread was:
So, I have thought about it, and I have totally disregarded it as hogwash. Without ownership of a capital good, such as intellectual capital, there is no capitalism. A copyright is only a monopoly insofar as it grants me exclusive rights over something I own. Just like I own my house, or my car. You could say I have a monopoly on the use of those as well, if you want to get technical.
Anyway, feel free to reply with another wall of text, or more self-indulgent blathering, but it will not change my opinion on the matter. Greedy or not, if I write a book, I want to make a profit, and I want to know that my ownership of the work is protected under the law.

Good for you. Honestly. :)
May I also suggest you try seeking out some information from sites not so much over the top? Allow me to recommend Michael Geist. He's been on top of this thing from the beginning, and has become a pretty frequent info source for most North American media.

I never told you as such, and in fact said just the opposite- a person can fully own the first instance of a creative work, which is a naturally scarce thing, and have complete control to do with it as they please. However, you fail to distinguish between that first copy and subsequent copies, which are not actually created by the original person, and which cannot be owned in any kind of natural, meaningful sense due to their supply being limitless.
First, various creative works existed for thousands of years before copyrights were even conceived of, so they are not essential for such works to be made. That detail aside, I think copyrights do provide a good incentive for people to create new works, and thus can be useful to society from a cultural perspective (if not an economic one). I also certainly have an appreciation for what intellectual property laws do, as I work in the pharmaceutical industry, and industry that couldn't exist in its current form without the protection of patents. However, while copyrights on one side provide a benefit to society by encouraging the creation of various works, they are at the same time detrimental to society by creating economic waste (as people are paying for copies that are naturally in infinite supply), and can also be harmful from a cultural perspective as well if the duration, breadth, and enforcement of copyrights actually ends up deterring the creation of new works. All of these things must be taken into account when considering what the scope of copyrights should be, and I think that right now the state of copyrights are horrible skewed towards their detrimental attributes.
Correct; and neither is there socialism or any other kind of economic system. This goes back to what I already said- if there isn't any kind of meaningful natural ownership of something then economic systems simply don't apply to it in any meaningful way. Trying to bootstrap such things into economic systems by creating artificial scarcity only creates economic waste, which nearly every economic system (including capitalism) purports to try to minimize.
You can want lots of things, but if those wants involve other people then you need to convince them to go along with it, and most people don't find the proposition of "I want to make money off of you" very convincing. You could always get some legislators to pass laws that run contrary to what the general public finds reasonable, but it turns out that when you do that those laws tend to be ignored much of the time (kind of like what we're seeing right now with copyright). You could then always try to convince those legislators to take more and more drastic enforcement measure, but it also turns out that there's only so much of that people are willing to put up with, and if you get to that point then things starting getting pretty ugly (fortunately we're still pretty far off from that). Basically if you want people to go along with what you want you need to show them that they're getting some benefit out of it that's commensurate with what they're giving up. Such a give and take is pretty much the fundamentals of how a healthy society operates, and it's unfortunate that so many people seem to forget that these days.
Anyway, if you feel that there's no chance you'll get anything worthwhile out of reading and responding to any further posts I make then please feel free to simply ignore everything further that I post in the thread. There's no shame in walking away from a conversation you're not getting anything out of, and in fact it's the far more reasonable and prudent course of action when compared to carrying on such a conversation and simply wasting your time.

Exactly, I think an idea is the same whether it is an original or a copy. If a person owns one, a person should own the rights to the other.
In this, I agree with you. I think we are just possibly at opposite sides of the owner-public spectrum (or whatever you want to call it). I always think of the supply side first, nearly to the exclusion of the demand side. I think first of the producers, as that is where the product is created, and without them, it doesn't exist. The other method is to think of the demand side first, since without them, nobody buys the product, so the product will cease to exist. But, i am just a more supply-side oriented economist.
In other words, i think the positives, in today's word, for active government enforcement for ownership of intellectual property far outweighs the societal harm of an imposed scarcity.
I should have said 'individual' or 'private' ownership. Capitalism is the only economic model in major use today that espouses private ownership of property, that I know of. Socialism espouses collective ownership, either by a group of workers or government, of property.
I, personally, like the idea of private ownership MUCH more, since i believe it fits with human nature better. People are, at their base, immensely selfish beings. Few people think of other people before they think of themselves; few people 'give until it hurts'. Private ownership and/or the ability to make a living for themselves gives the incentive most people require to put in a hard day's work.
To me, this is why, at least in recent history (the last 200 years or so), the countries that protected private ownership most vigorously have also been the most innovative (19th century Britain and 20th century U.S.).
Most people I know are willing to pay for a product that they find entertaining or useful. Most people I have met understand that people need to be compensated for their efforts, else these efforts with, in all likelihood, cease. Furthermore, most people I have talked to about copyrights agree that those that bypass said copyrights are thieves. I don't think i need to do much convincing on these matters; at least not in my neck of the woods.
I am not going to change my mind, barring some great epiphany, however I do feel the urge to rebut the points you make. Like i said at the outset, I am a dyed in the wool capitalist, and I feel copyrights strengthen an owners claim to intellectual capital. The stronger the capitalist model is, the happier I am.
When I say I am a 'dyed in the wool capitalist', think more 'Ayn Rand type Objectivist' than classical capitalist. Not only do I think those that create should have strong claims to ownership, I actually believe the creators should be the ones in charge of the direction of society as a whole (with government safeguards of individual liberties and rights, obviously). Perhaps, this illustrates why I believe anything that reduces the power of a copyright as inimical to my personal paradigm.
This is why I believe we are arguing from different sides of the spectrum. I believe in stronger personal property rights, you want stronger collective property rights (semantics aside, correct me if I am wrong). I don't think either of us are much willing to change our respective stands during the course of this discussion.
/wall-text

Why? They're two different things, and are completely opposite in terms of natural scarcity. The leap you try to make is completely nonsensical.
Odd that you say this, while at the same time wishing to artificially restrict supply. The first copy of a work and subsequent copies of a work are two very different things, in that the former has a limited supply while the latter has an infinite supply. The approach you're taking is to try to increase the value of the first copy by restricting the supply of the later copies, thus driving an increase in the supply of the first copy. However, this is not an economic approach. Economics deals with the natural state of supply and demand as they stand, and trying to artificially change the supply of or demand for certain goods only results in economic waste. As I said earlier, there may be other reasons for wanting to promote an increase in the supply of certain thing, but there is no good reason for doing so simply from an economic perspective. This isn't a supply vs demand approach as you make it out to be, it's a difference of an economic vs some entirely non-economic approach.
Within the past 200 years some of the biggest economic expansions have actually been correlated with countries ignoring artificial constraints on intellectual property. A major thing that allowed the American industrial revolution to occur was that we basically decided to completely ignore all of the European patents on technology and build up our industrial base without paying them a dime. The American movie industry headed out to California to get away from the enforcement of Edison's patents, and free of those constraints then proceeded to flourish. The country with the greatest economic growth in the last couple of decades has been China, aided in large part by ignoring the various IP restrictions other countries operate under (just as we in the US did for our own industrial revolution). Additionally, in a much more broad historical context, the amount of creativity during a period in time best correlates to how much leisure time the citizenry had; it seems that when people have free time and few worries, they simply create. It's just what people do, regardless of whether there is monetary compensation involved.
Then perhaps you need to get out more. Or ask better question when discussing the matter with people, question that will provide useful answers, not just the answers you want. Moreover, if most people already buy into the whole copyright system, then why do you think legislation like ACTA is required? If only a few people a going against the whole copyright system then there's not much of a problem that needs to be addressed, and on the flip side if piracy is actually a major problem then that means there are lots of people who aren't fully buying into the whole copyright deal and do need to be convinced that it provides some worthwhile benefit for them. You really should decide which of these perspectives you're coming from.
A "dyed in the wool capitalist" would look at the natural scarcity model of creative works and figure out a way to effectively trade the scarce aspect (the first copies) within the capitalist economic model. They'd also look at the part of the natural model for creative works where there is no scarcity and simply write off those subsequent copies as something that can't be owned in any meaningful sense and thus can't be sold. There have also been plenty of models throughout history that have managed to effectively monetize creative works without the need to artificially restrict the supply of copies of the initial works. Patronage, live performances, industrial innovations as trade secrets, or more recently bundling the copy with something that does have some degree of scarcity. Ironically, it tends to be those who lack creativity and innovation who complain the loudest that the world is the way it is and not the way they want it to be.
Whooo boy, that explains a lot.
Alright, you're wrong. I'm arguing from neither the position of personal property or collective property, neither from the position of capitalism, socialism, or pretty much any other type of -ism for that matter. I care far more about results than ideologies, and am willing to use whatever type of system or combination of systems that I think will produce the most worthwhile results. My approach to any kind of situation is to first address the question of "what are the results that we're after," then address the question of "what are the natural realities of the situation," and only after those two question have been fully addressed to look at what approaches could best produce the desired results given the realities of the situation. I think any other approach is to put the cart before the horse, and is why ideological approaches almost invariably turn out to be such failures.

Ownership is ownership. I believe a person should be able to own an idea, you seem not to.
Not odd at all. I like the freedoms that a laissez-faire economy grant a person to build personal wealth. I also believe that people should be able to defend this freedom. What you call limiting supply, I call protecting capital form thieves. It is both of this things, it all depends on which a person wishes to prioritize.
Right, because an ad hominem is a great way to win an argument. Fine, I'll play. Perhaps I just have a better quality of friends and acquaintances than you do? Seriously, most people I know believe that stealing is wrong. Do you hang out primarily with reprobates?
Few capitalists disregard profit-motive. In fact, every economics class I have ever taken revolves around making the most profit in the most efficient way! I was a government/economic major in college. I worked for the U.S. Congress for about a year, and then I was an Investment Manager with Morgan Stanley for several years until I retired at age 30 (I had enough money, and the 6 day, 70+ hour work weeks were killing me).
I think I know what people mean when they say 'capitalism' (which is rarely the text-book definition). I heard enough of their views on the matter in both of my jobs (especially answering constituent calls for Congress). In my experience, people are fine with paying for goods and services, as long as they don't believe they are getting ripped off. Few people believe paying $15 for a bestseller or $60 for a new game is getting ripped off. They may believe those prices are too high, in which case they just don't buy the product; piracy of any sort doesn't generally occur to them.
I also know that without strong property rights for ALL forms of capital, the current economic model we enjoy would falter. I am a firm believer that people will do what is in their best interests. What is in their best interests is that property rights be protect stringently. Just like a person wants the government to patrol the street for vandals, even though their house probably will never be robbed, people want a system of laws to protect intellectual property, just in case it is their rights that need protecting in the future.
I know people are willing (and in many cases, happy) to pay for the rights use intellectual property. I know because as an investment advisor, I charge a 2% fee per year (paid quarterly) for all assets the client had under management. Rain or shine, market up or market down, I was paid 2% of their assets a year. These clients could have easily gotten my advice second hand from one of their friends that I had as a client, but these people chose to pay me for my advice. This is much more than a $7 paperback, we are talking about million plus dollar accounts; they could have bought a new car with that money.
My thinking on government and regulation is similar to Thomas Hobbes'. We must have a government to protect the rights of citizens from each other. Even the strongest among us must sleep, an in this state even the weakest among us can do them harm. Without government, he argues, "...the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...". Similarly, without tough property protections, I think the life of the economy would be quite short as well.
You can argue about the scarcity and efficiency of an economy all you like, but that isn't the real issue. The issue is that people expect to be compensated in some fashion for work that they do. This could be a kiss from the wife for taking out the garbage, or it could be royalty payments for a song they wrote.
It is human nature to want and expect some sort of compensation. No, it is not always given, but it is something to hope for at the end of one's travails, however earth-shattering or trivial they might be. Without at least the possibility of a reward, I doubt as many people would bother. Heck, I was getting paid boat-loads, and I gave it up just for more free time.

Well, I think I've seen the totality of your views on this matter, and have expressed my own views on it to as much of an extent as I have interest in doing at this time. Since this is about as far as this will go with the soap box I imagine the greater disputes on this issue will ultimately be settled with either the ballot, jury, or ammo box. See you at the polls.