[A2k] Declan: Obama White House: Copyright treaty is a 'national security' secret

[Manon Ress]

Go tot he link to see the documents CNET refers to
Manon


  March 12, 2009 5:45 PM
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html?tag=newsLatestHeadlinesArea.0

Obama White House: Copyright treaty is a 'national security' secret
by Declan McCullagh

   Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual
secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the
U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize
some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.

Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of
government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a
discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and
related materials are "classified in the interest of national security
pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only
if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the
original classification authority is able to identify or describe the
damage."

Jamie Love, director of the non-profit group Knowledge Ecology
International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that
resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter
was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer
in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Love had written in his original request on January 31 -- submitted
soon after Obama's inauguration -- that the documents "are being
widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan and the U.S.
There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the
Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10
were "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to
Executive Order 12,958."

In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA
"should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of
doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information
confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by
disclosure."

Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say
that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial
scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement
that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

A June 2008 memo from the International Chamber of Commerce, signed by
pro-copyright groups, says: "intellectual property theft is no less a
crime than physical property theft. An effective ACTA should therefore
establish clear and transparent standards for the calculation and
imposition of effective criminal penalties for IP theft that... apply
to both online and off-line IP transactions." Similarly, the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce has called for "criminal penalties for IP crimes,
including online infringements."

Last fall, two senators -- Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-
Penn.) -- known for their support of stringent intellectual property
laws expressed concern that the ACTA could be too far-reaching.

Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles
the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics,
technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has
turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We
oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.

***************************************************************************
Manon Ress
manon.ress@keionline.org
Knowledge Ecology International
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Fax: +1.202.332.2673