Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks

[Ekiqa]

Extend US copyright law all over the world?

I can hear the US being told to fuck off and go bugger itself already. Nobody is going to surrender the amount of sovereignty this "treaty" proposal would require.

The non-English speaking world, yes.

Canada, under Harper, or even under Ignatief, would follow lock-step with Obama on this.

Australia seems to be headed this way anyways, internet censorship, that it would most likely follow along too.

The UK has been doing what the US has told it to do for several years now, Brown is no different from Blair in that regard.

So don't laugh, the US has several vassal-like states already.

[Big Orange]

Balkanized? They're certainly counterproductive, but they're hardly fragmented. Copyright and patents are handled by the federal government and applied uniformly throughout the country; it's not a state matter.

The Federal Government seems badly snarled up over a lot of things anyway, and the ridiculous ruckus over beneficial healthcare reforms seems as volatile and incoherent as the real life Balkans to me. The broken down IP laws are as fragmented as they are restrictive, leading to "the tragedy of the anti-commons", this is elaborated upon by Michael Heller (Professor of Real Estate Law) in The Gridlock Economy and here he is on an online lecture. Owners of music tracks often have a nasty habit of clasping their fists around the ownership rights, shouting 'MINE!!!', which is why videos on YouTube have the sound disabled (like so), even major media companies have a lot trouble publishing TV shows on DVD with licensed music content (like 1987 cult series, Werewolf), and on a more serious note drug patenting gets in the way of common sense and the common good.

[ThomasP]

A summary of some of this went up on Wikileaks earlier.

The paper presents what appears to be a short summary of the "Internet chapter" of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The summary is supposed to inform member states about the part of ACTA that will deal with internet enforcement and will be discussed at the Seoul meeting of ACTA.

Notably, the "Internet chapter" is being drafted by USTR, a US lead ACTA negotiator group, and its creation process even within the ACTA working group itself, remains obscure. While the US has given a "detailed oral description" of the drafted internet chapter, the draft documents themselves are subject to "confidentiality clauses" between "goverment agencies" and a "number of private stakeholders". The presented summary is to give "advance-warning" and "preliminary indication of the content" of the upcoming US proposal.

The content of the summary reflect details that have appeared in the media recently, including rights management and especially related enforcement, as well as the US-centric development of enforcement on the Internet.

The Seoul meeting has just ended, having taken place from 4th to 6th of November 2009. The US proposal seems to have been debated there more widely.

There's a PDF download of the actual document at the bottom.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

The UK has been doing what the US has told it to do for several years now, Brown is no different from Blair in that regard.

In this case, however, the UK can't act on it's own. The EU has stepped into this particular arena, generally in a pro-consumer stance, and if the UK signs a treaty that conflicts with EU law, EU law will win.

[Big Orange]

EU is not immune from the connivances of music industry and aging musicians:

The European Parliament voted Thursday in favour of extending musicians' royalties to 70 years, a sizeable increase on the current 50 years but less than an original EU Commission initiative.

Link

And it's ridiculous that after an significant author dies (for a music score or novel etc), his works are still copyrighted for many decades afterwards, it's untenable.

[ThomasP]

Existing copyright law already guarantees the lifetime of the creator. Anything beyond that is corporate rent-seeking in the first place.

Even the drug companies can't keep a patent past 20 years with all the cash they throw at it. It really makes you wonder how the entertainment industry, which is really small beans in comparison, is getting itself this much pull over the lawmaking process.

I think a big part of it is that nobody really cared because it wasn't affecting anything. When you start trying to pass laws to get people cut off from the Internet, world-wide at that, people start to notice.

[Big Orange]

Most people didn't notice the dickery of the music industry when DVDs and the Internet was not around, but people have gotten increasingly aware of it since the increasing number of YouTube take downs, music tracks going out of print, TV shows kept in deadlock, and paying customers getting legally hounded. Like a weather balloon filling up with sewage water and getting bigger n' bigger.