[Ecommerce] Declan on CAFTA

[Manon Ress]

QUOTE:
Specifically, CAFTA calls for civil and criminal penalties to punish
anyone who "circumvents" copy-protection technology or "provides"
such tools to anyone else. Like the DMCA, that could cover everything
from DeCSS (which removes copy-protection from DVDs) to products that
do the same for e-books.

The Central American nations participating in CAFTA must also:

=95 Permit software patents

=95 Extend copyright protection to "70 years after the author's death"

=95 Ban the "manufacture" or "export" of any hardware or software that
could decode encrypted satellite TV signals

=95 Offer "online public access to a reliable and accurate" WhoIs
database of domain name registration details

It's true that these may be ideas beloved by the Bush administration
and business lobbyists, but they have far more to do with special-
interest lobbying than traditional notions of free trade.

In reality, they're simply the latest in a string of victories that
copyright lobbyists have managed to accumulate in the last decade--
under both Democratic and Republican presidents--through adept work
at influencing the arcane process of treaty drafting.
END OF QUOTE

http://news.com.com/Copyright+lobbyists+strike+again/
2010-1071_3-5811025.html?tag=3Dsas.email

Copyright lobbyists strike again
August 1, 2005, 4:00 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh

Hollywood and large U.S. software companies chalked up another
crucial yet little-noticed victory last week with the final approval
of the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
You wouldn't know it from a political debate veering between labor
standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major
section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections
of U.S. copyright law.

Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican
Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's broad prohibition on bypassing
copy-protection technology.

This prohibition, of course, has been problematic in the United
States. Courts have interpreted it as barring news organizations from
linking to DVD-descrambling utilities, and lawyers have invoked it to
stifle discussion of security vulnerabilities and even prevent
conference presentations from taking place. In an earlier column, I
wrote how it prevented me from reading password-protected government
documents.

The easy days of slipping in a few paragraphs into a trade treaty may
be over.
Specifically, CAFTA calls for civil and criminal penalties to punish
anyone who "circumvents" copy-protection technology or "provides"
such tools to anyone else. Like the DMCA, that could cover everything
from DeCSS (which removes copy-protection from DVDs) to products that
do the same for e-books.

The Central American nations participating in CAFTA must also:

=95 Permit software patents

=95 Extend copyright protection to "70 years after the author's death"

=95 Ban the "manufacture" or "export" of any hardware or software that
could decode encrypted satellite TV signals

=95 Offer "online public access to a reliable and accurate" WhoIs
database of domain name registration details

It's true that these may be ideas beloved by the Bush administration
and business lobbyists, but they have far more to do with special-
interest lobbying than traditional notions of free trade.

In reality, they're simply the latest in a string of victories that
copyright lobbyists have managed to accumulate in the last decade--
under both Democratic and Republican presidents--through adept work
at influencing the arcane process of treaty drafting.

Negotiating below the radar
"We push for that in trade agreements and treaties and bilateral"
agreements, Robert Cresanti, vice president for public policy at the
Business Software Alliance, told me last week. Members of his group
include Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM,
Intel and Microsoft.

That strategy has been remarkably successful. It began in the
mid-1990s with a copyright treaty crafted under the umbrella of the
World Intellectual Property Organization, a habitually copyright-
friendly arm of the United Nations.

The WIPO treaty says that nations must provide "effective legal
remedies against the circumvention" of copy-protection technologies.
That spurred the United States down the path that led to enacting the
DMCA in 1998.

But many sizable nations never signed the WIPO treaty: Canada,
Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and
many others abstained (Click for PDF). And even some participating
nations have been less than aggressive, with Japan concluding the
treaty permits a less-regulatory approach.

That's why business lobbyists have been pressing to include far more
precise rules in subsequent treaties. And the Bush and Clinton
administrations have been happy to go along, effectively saying to
poorer countries: If you want the United States to open its markets
to your products, the price is adopting the most problematic sections
of our copyright law.

The result? In the last two years, Australia, Chile, and Singapore
have agreed to software patents and DMCA-like prohibitions on
bypassing copyright protection.

Those "anti-circumvention" requirements have even popped up in a
Council of Europe treaty ostensibly devoted to "cybercrime," which a
U.S. Senate panel approved last week.

One reason for the copyright lobby's success is that bending ears and
twisting arms at organizations like WIPO and the Council of Europe is
expensive. Groups that advocate a more balanced approach to copyright
just haven't been able to keep up.

Now that may be changing. "From the mid-90s up until the present day,
industry groups have gone to international forums and sought greater
IP protections so they could export them as treaties and bring them
back home," said Mike Godwin, a lawyer at the Public Knowledge
advocacy group.

"Taking a tip from them, civil society groups from the developing
nations like Brazil and India have said we can do this too," Godwin
said. So are their allies in the United States.

In other words, the easy days of slipping in a few paragraphs into a
trade treaty may be over. That's probably a good thing: Free trade
can easily take place without the copyright lobby's more far-reaching
suggestions.

biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's Washington, D.C., correspondent.
He chronicles the busy intersection between technology and politics.
Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief
for Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News,
Time magazine and HotWired.

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