ACTA Is Coming, Bend Over,Grit Your Teeth, Sorry – NO Lube
Whats the best way to get everyone to vote for one your pet laws..?
well, it kind of depends on the law you want passed by a few good lines that rarely fail:
Blah blah blah… global warming… blah blah
Blah blah blah… think of the children… blah blah
Blah blah blah… or the terrorists win … blah blah
Blah blah blah… with us or against us… blah blah
Blah blah blah… millions of jobs lost… blah blah
Dan (the Joker) Glickman has come up with a good new one “Simply put, those who don’t back the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement don’t support intellectual property rights”.
Here are two good article, he first one from Ars:
Hollywood’s top lobbyist is being slammed for telling the government that Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement debates over transparency are a “distraction.” But we actually agree with his conclusion: open up the process more—lots more—so we can talk about substance and not procedure.
MPAA head Dan Glickman sent a letter yesterday to both Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and to US Trade Representative Ron Kirk in which he called for a serious US push to pass the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. That’s certainly expected—ACTA contains a host of goodies for Hollywood and the recording industry—but what came as a surprise was Glickman’s irritation at various ACTA “protests” which create “apprehension over the Agreement’s substance.”
He’s referring to online outlets that have hoisted the anti-ACTA flag over the last year, accusing the treaty of being a pretext for ramming “three strikes” laws through without Congressional oversight or empowering Customs agents to check the contents of your iPod. Based on our reporting, neither of these items appears to be in the draft text, but the secretive nature of the negotiations and the bland, impenetrable public statements about ACTA have fueled plenty of suspicion.
The process has created a debate over the very notion of “transparency” as applied to international negotiations, but it’s not a discussion Glickman wants to be having at the moment. His letter argues that “outcries on the lack of transparency in the ACTA negotiations are a distraction. They distract from the substance and ambition of the ACTA…”—which sounds like a roundabout way of asking negotiators to ignore the cries of a clamoring public and simply get on with the business of cobbling together a Hollywood-friendly trade agreement.
This is certainly how groups like Public Knowledge are painting the letter; staff attorney Sherwin Siy called Glickman’s words “a pathetic excuse for logic. It borders on the Chewbacca Defense for its use of non-sequitur. The ’substance and ambition’ of the ACTA? And what, pray tell, is so important in the substance of ACTA that it trumps the fundamentals of open government?”
Or, in other words, “You bring the pitchforks, I’ve got the torches; we march on the castle of the evil tyrant come nightfall!” And, frankly, we should be marching on the castles of those who try to trump the fundamentals of open government and turn public power to private ends.
But that’s not quite what the letter says. The next (unquoted) paragraph says that the MPAA “appreciates” the US Trade Representative’s efforts to open ACTA up to (a tiny bit of) scrutiny. (Siy certainly knows about this, as he was one of the 42 people invited to see and comment on the US-drafted Internet section of ACTA).
“We support this objective and encourage the US government to direct the [transparency] process so that we can engage in a meaningful dialogue on substance rather than procedural matters,” says the letter.
Glickman & Co. are actually asking USTR to open the process further in order to have a debate on the issues raised by the text rather than a having arguments about transparency, or arguments about terrifying items that aren’t actually in the text. Remove the process objections so we can talk about substance; isn’t this exactly what the reform groups want?
Only real transparency will doIt sounds like a good idea to us, but of course much depends on what is actually done. The “open” process so far has consisted largely of draft texts shown to a few public interest lawyers under strict nondisclosure agreements—pretty pitiful stuff for a fast-tracked trade agreement that won’t need Senate approval, but will try to export the DMCA to the rest of the world. This is being done in our name, and we want to see and weigh in on our trade agreement… before the negotiators are done and it becomes a fait accompli.
As for those negotiators, here’s what they have to say. “A variety of groups have…”
Read the rest including some great commentary on Ars
and the second one from Wired:
If you don’t back a copyright treaty being negotiated in secret, you must want to destroy Hollywood, its blockbuster movies and all the jobs they create.
At least that’s the message from the Motion Picture Association of America.
It’s spelled out in a Thursday memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging lawmakers to support the Obama administration’s efforts toward negotiating an intellectual property agreement with more than a dozen countries.
Dan Glickman, the MPAA’s chairman, informs lawmakers that millions of film-related jobs are in peril because of internet piracy. Simply put, those who don’t back the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement don’t support intellectual property rights, he wrote.
“Opponents of ACTA are either indifferent to this situation, or actively hostile toward efforts to improve copyright enforcement worldwide,” Glickman wrote.
That’s an insultingly black-and-white viewpoint. It’s also not an accurate description of the treaty’s critics.
The reason many groups distrust the accord is simple: It’s being negotiated in secret, the Obama administration has declared it a “national security” issue and the chief executive has filled his administration with at least five former intellectual property attorneys from the Recording Industry Association of America.
What’s more, all that we know about the proposal has been generated by leaks. Here is what the most recent leak of two week’s ago suggests:
A European Commission memo written by an unnamed EU official shows the United States might want ISPs around the world to punish suspected, repeat downloaders with a system of “graduated response” — code for a three-strikes policy that results in the customer eventually being disconnected from the internet with the ISP alone deciding what constitutes infringement and fair use.
Since there’s no such policy in the United States now, the demands could end up being foisted on all Americans through a decidedly undemocratic process. We described that as policy laundering at its finest.
Public Knowledge, a “copyleft” lobbying group who has seen the unfinished treaty’s text, blasted Glickman’s comment, which comes weeks after the MPAA urged the Federal Communications Commission to support internet filtering of unauthorized copyrighted material.
“We do want to make certain that the rights of internet users are not trampled by overwhelming government power asserted at the behest of a single special interest,” Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge’s president, said in a statement. She added that it…
Read the rest of the article as well as some cool commentary on WIRED
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