Earlier this year, I sent my concerns about ACTA (and the general scorched-earth approach to copyright that puts the rights of Lady Gaga and the Transformers above consumer protections and even basic human rights) to some politicians. The feedback went something like this:
I'll be as brief as I can:
Personally, I'd like to see us return to a pre-DMCA world where copyright was a civil matter. Sadly, I've scaled back my hopes significantly, and I now just don't want you to destroy freedom to protect a specific business model.
- Please, NO damage awards based on decades-old, half-remembered, vastly inflated, and entirely unscientific extrapolation of a rough estimate of copyright losses due to fake tractor parts. That's where they currently come from. Seriously. Look it up.
- Please, NO enforcement that accepts accusation as conviction. In this country we are presumed innocent.
- Please, NO enforcement that restricts or constrains Internet access. The Internet is where we work, and play, and socialize, and seek medical advice and employment, and have political discussions, and provide feedback to elected officials. [France passed a "three-strikes" law, and is getting 25,000 accusations a day.] [Only 1.7% of sites blocked by Scandinavia's "child-porn" filters are actually child porn - Boing Boing]
- Please, do not sacrifice free speech for corporate profits and Hollywood campaign donations.
- Please, NO mandates for ISPs to snoop on their customers. That is an end-run around the Fourth Amendment. [In Russia, this has been a convenient way to silence dissidents.]
- Please, protect fair use and punish blanket takedown notices and other baseless legal bullying.
- Please, ensure that groups purporting to collect royalties for artists are actually paying the artists.
- Please, ensure that companies externalizing the cost of enforcement of their copyrights to the government are actually paying their taxes.
- Please, stop referring to unauthorized copying as theft (theft deprives the original owner of something), or piracy (piracy is a very real life-threatening issue that should not be trivialized).
- Please, NO more pressuring other countries to accept our laws on their soil.
- Please, NO more demonizing Canada for specious copyright transgressions.
- Please, accept that DRM is never going to work technically, and only serves to frustrate legal purchasers of content.
- Please, stop bundling music and movies with pharmaceuticals. Using fear about counterfeit drugs is a cheap tactic.
- Please, consult with Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com/ , the EFF http://www.eff.org/ , and the CDT http://www.cdt.org/ .
Thank you for your time.
What I got back from Maria Cantwell in July was very disappointing.
Dear Mr. Lalonde,
Thank you for contacting me regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations. I appreciate hearing from you on this matter and sincerely regret the delayed response.
As you may know, the ACTA negotiations began in June 2008 with the participation of Australia, Canada, the European Union and its 27 member states, Japan, Mexico, Morcocco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States. The negotiations, which are scheduled to conclude in 2010, have the goal of providing an international framework to improve enforcement of intellectual property right (IPR) law.
The ACTA initiative aims to create improved, international standards to fight the growing problem of counterfeiting and piracy. The effort is not intended to interfere with the fundamental rights and civil liberties of ordinary citizens, and will be consistent with the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and the Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.
I am aware of your concerns about the transparency of the ACTA negotiations. However, it is an accepted practice during trade negotiations not to disclose negotiating texts to the public thus enabling officials to engage in the frank exchanges necessary for agreement on complex issues.
You will be pleased to know that the USTR has taken steps to ensure an unprecedented level of transparency in the ACTA negotiations, and won endorsement of the importance of meaningful public input at the second level of negotiations in November 2009. Additionally, on April 21, 2010, the USTR released a public, pre-decisional draft text of the ACTA. It is available for your reference through the USTR website at http://www.ustr.gov/acta.
Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. You may also be interested in signing up for periodic updates for Washington State residents. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance.
Sincerely,
Maria Cantwell
United States Senator
I've replied, but don't expect to hear back.
I have to say that I'm am deeply disappointed.
By bringing up public health, it seems clear that you are among those trying to conflate physical counterfeiting with unauthorized digital copying. "Consistency" is also an obvious ploy to slowly ratchet up onerous copyright law by getting excessive laws passed in "sympathetic" regimes then demanding them here.
And far from ensuring unprecedented levels of transparency, it is clear that the USTR is doing everything in his power to keep these negotiations, and the current treaty itself, secret. This is well documented.
http://boingboing.net/2010/02/25/acta-leak-now-we-kno.htmlAs I rejected it when Vice President Cheney attempted to claim that secrecy was necessary to have "frank discussions" in his energy policy discussions, I reject it here. Anything that can't be said in public is shady when developing policy in a democracy.
The text of ACTA has once again leaked, and once again, it is clear that its supporters (yourself included, apparently) will not rest until all of our Internet traffic is monitored (allegedly for "infringing content"), our laptops and iPods are searched at the border, and entire families are collectively punished (counter to Genevea Convention "consistency") based on specious accusations of media companies.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/14/acta-leaks----again.htmlPlease tell me you have the integrity to dismiss the made-up losses media companies are constantly parroting, to allow us to create without the constant fear of corporate legal threat, and to protect our right to speak and assemble digitally for the future.
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/acta-declaration/
Perhaps not surprisingly, Senator Cantwell's second-highest contributor is Microsoft.
0 comments:
Post a Comment