The US versions of vastly overreaching anti-piracy legislation — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate — were rightly put down through concerted and coordinated effort on the internet. That the same fate didn’t befall the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) plum amazes me, but maybe we’ll be collectively more intelligent the next time it comes around.
But SOPA and PIPA look like they were created by pikers that took bad dictation from the entertainment cartel compared to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (.pdf; 36Kb) (ACTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being hammered out by the members of the global copyright cartel themselves.
These are much more serious because they’re treaties and outside the reach of our elected representatives. Three years ago, the Obama administration issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request denial (.pdf; 444Kb) to Knowledge Ecology International, declaring the contents of the proposed international treaty a national security secret. The previous Bush administration similarly rejected an equivalent FOIA request (.pdf; 108Kb) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It’s apparently okay to have a national security secret drafted by the entertainment cartel and shared with Australia, Canada, the 27 member countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Switzerland but not with the American citizenry.
If that’s not bad enough, because it’s being crafted as a treaty, no congressional approval is required. Public Knowledge calls it policy laundering:
“The greatest concern over ACTA is that it purports to ratchet up protections for IP rights holders without even the barest measures to preserve either the balance in IP law or due process rights of citizens. Without going through any pre-existing avenues of legal change—whether domestic or international—this treaty may be considered an act of ‘policy laundering.’ That is, the use of an international treaty to justify the passage of controversial legislation within one’s own country.”
Last month, Kader Arif, the European Parliament’s special rapporteur for the treaty quit, saying the European Parliament and civil society organizations had been excluded from the “masquerade.” Shortly before that, Helena Drnovsek-Zorko, the Slovenian signatory to the treaty, publicly disowned it and the Polish government suspended ratification after politicians protested wearing Guy Fawkes masks. In the US, more than 75 law professors sent an open letter to President Obama criticizing the secrecy surrounding the treaty.
David Jolly, writing for the New York Times, reports that european activists have amassed about 1.5 million online signatures calling on the European Union to reject the treaty.
Draconian intellectual property infringement criminalization is also creeping into the TPP, ostensibly an agreement to enhance trade and investment. Cory Doctorow, writing for BoingBoing, notes one TPP provision that has leaked calls for mandatory licenses for computer buffers. “That means that the buffers in your machine could need a separate, negotiated license for every playback of copyrighted works, and buffer designs that the entertainment industry doesn’t like — core technical architectures — would become legally fraught because they’d require millions of license negotiations or they’d put users in danger of lawsuits,” writes Doctorow.
Like ACTA, TPP is being negotiated in secret and Techdirt reports the parties have agreed to reveal the final treaty only four years after it has been ratified.
Techdirt also reports that when US civil society groups planned an open meeting to discuss TPP, the Office of the United States Trade Representative convinced the hosting hotel to cancel the groups’ reservation.
Related articles:
- Beware the entertainment cartel’s TPP
The US-based entertainment cartel is hell-bent on putting the internet - Professional ‘rasslin’ on TPP
It was all goodness and light on 12 May when - The lost manuscripts: Social implications of hypermedia
In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in - New York Times endorses TPP
The New York Times has endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), - Warren calls for Obama to release TPP documentation
US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is wielding her substantial progressive
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TPP may be worse than ACTA; we’ll never know until it’s too late was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Monday, 6 February 2012 at 2:55 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)