[Ecommerce] FYI: Techdaily story on "Making IP law through FTA negotiations" workshop

[Manon Anne Ress]

Techdaily April 14, 2003

Intellectual Property
Trade Deals Spark Debate Over Intellectual Property Rights
by Drew Clark

Excessively strong protections for copyright materials and trademarks in 
trade agreements between the United States and Chile, Singapore and 
Latin America could adversely impact computer companies, Internet 
service providers (ISPs), consumers, libraries and overseas businesses, 
a panel of experts said Monday.

American University's law school hosted a forum on the intellectual 
property impact of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) 
and of separate bilateral deals with Chile and Singapore, and the panel 
said elements of the various deals would exceed U.S. law. The United 
States has negotiated, but not ratified, the latter two agreements, 
while the FTAA is in the works.

The key problems with the agreements, panelists said, include provisions 
that tilt toward content owners at the expense of ISPs, and also that 
would require Singapore and Chile to bar the decryption of anti-piracy 
technologies used by copyright holders.

Provisions of the Chile and Singapore agreements would mandate that 
those nations require ISPs to provide the names and addresses of 
subscribers who allegedly have engaged in copyright infringement, said 
Sarah Deutsch, an attorney with Verizon Communications. She said the 
provision would ratify the recording industry's position in its ongoing 
lawsuit with Verizon.
"We have language being exported to other countries to create an 
administrative process" of the sort sought by the recording industry, 
Deutsch said. "This is one of the issues where the agreement has taken a 
step ahead of where the law" is.

Jason Mahler, vice president of the Computer and Communications Industry 
Association (CCIA), addressed the issue of language to bar the 
circumvention of encryption technology deployed by copyright holders. He 
said exemptions to such language is necessary so that it does not ban 
legitimate research or harm the ability of tech devices to work together.

Mahler said CCIA is seeking to have the Office of U.S. Trade 
Representative add a separate addendum to the Chile and Singapore deals 
to limit their scope. The goals, he said, are to ensure that language be 
included to de-legitimize what Lexmark, a U.S. manufacturer of computer 
printers, has done in using the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act to 
sue a company that made interoperable printer cartridges.

Bob Oakley of the Georgetown University law library criticized the FTAA, 
a multilateral agreement still in its early stages, for including a 
provision calling for European-style database protection even though no 
country in the American continent includes such protection.
"Since a lot of these [agreements] have as their objective the 
exportation of American law, [database protection] is an odd thing to be 
there" because neither the United States nor the World Intellectual 
Property Organization has not adopted database protection, he said.

John Mitchell, an attorney with InteractionLaw.com who has represented 
video retailers, said the FTAA fails to include a provision of U.S. law 
known as the "first-sale doctrine" that limits the exclusive rights of 
copyright holders. "If we are going to be true to a defense of U.S. law, 
why have we taken that off the table?" he asked.


-- 
Manon Anne Ress
Consumer Project on Technology
www.cptech.org
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
manon.ress@cptech.org, voice: 1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176