[A2k] Faster Forward - Technology News, Observations and Occasional Rants by The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro

[Manon Ress]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/

ACTA puts digital rights on the table, locks the public out of the room

For the more than 10 years I've been writing this column, I keep
coming back to copyright-policy issues, and not just because I work in
Washington. Laws and court decisions constrain the hardware, software
and services we buy -- this was a subject of one of my first copyright-
overreach rants, back in 2000.

The fact that these legal and judicial barriers don't seem to stop
software fraud (I prefer not to use the term "piracy") or even halt
the distribution of tools used to unlock "protected" digital files and
formats doesn't seem to stop larger copyright holders from asking for
new laws to defend their interests.

That brings me to today's column, a look at an international
negotiation underway for a deal called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement. ACTA shares the defects of such existing, unbalanced
copyright laws as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then
wraps them up in a layer of secrecy that is at best counterproductive
and at worst contemptuous.

You have to wonder how the people involved in ACTA think they're going
to sell this thing to the public. How do you make the headline
description "SECRET COPYRIGHT TREATY" look palatable? How do you spin
a situation in which the government -- that is, our hired employees --
won't specify the goals of a negotiation done in our name and
concerning our rights?

"Absurd" is the right word for this. At one point during my no-
attribution-by-name interview with a "U.S. trade official" yesterday,
this person complained that much of the criticism of ACTA was based on
"hearsay." Well, whose fault is that?

ACTA offers plenty of potential for trouble on public-policy grounds,
too. Remember, you don't necessarily need a "you shall" or "you shall
not" clause in the law to coax companies to act as you'd wish when
incentives can suffice; see, for example, my colleague Cecilia Kang's
post this morning about possible changes afoot at Verizon. Merely
cementing the DMCA's sweeping "anti-circumvention" provisions into
international law seems awful enough, considering the frequent abuses
they've invited here -- my favorite example of DMCA overreach being
when the National Football League sought to use a since-overturned
copy-control system in digital TV to enforce local TV-coverage
blackouts.

I don't want to get on any more of a rant here, so let me close by
noting who I contacted for the column. In addition to my interview
with that trade official, I spoke with representatives of the
Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture
Association of America, the Consumer Electronics Association, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, Knowledge Ecology
International, and Canadian law professor (and noted ACTA opponent)
Michael Geist. I also chatted with two people who have seen the ACTA
documents under a non-disclosure agreement (one with a public-interest
group, the other working for a major American computing manufacturer);
they didn't break their NDA but did offer useful guidance. Lastly, I
checked with my former Post colleague Paul Blustein, who covered trade
issues for us for years and now studies them at the Brookings
Institution, to get some context about typical levels of disclosure in
trade negotiations.

Does ACTA bother you or not? Let's discuss this issue in the comments
-- or in today's Web chat, starting at noon.

By Rob Pegoraro  |  November 13, 2009; 11:16 AM
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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