[Ecommerce] International Herald Tribune: U.S. plays it tough on copyright rules

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

<SNIP>

James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology said the U.S. push for
its own IP standards - which he called "very, very aggressive" and "very
controversial" - might be coming at an unduly high cost in other areas.
The Central American trade accord included modest U.S. concessions on
sugar, for example, to the surprise of some analysts, who had expected
less.

Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry
Association of America, said the trade pacts "embody a new level of
standards for the digital age that go beyond the standards of existing
international agreements."

It was only proper for the administration in Washington to "protect that
most dynamic part of the U.S. economy," he said. Copyright-linked
industries account for 5 percent of American gross domestic product, he
estimates.

<SNIP>

Even an advanced country like Australia is a net importer of products
deriving from copyrighted or patented ideas. Thus, it is unclear what it
gains from tighter rules.

Love, who has advised other countries in their negotiations with the
United States, said the pattern of negotiations on the free trade
agreements seemed aimed at creating a strong, geographically distributed
network of support for U.S. standards.

This pattern, he asserted, seems "exactly designed to have someone in
every regional area with U.S. norms imposed on them" - to form a growing
floor for future international negotiations. "They're just
steamrollering the whole world," he said.

He added that the Americans were hardly alone among industrialized
countries in pushing their agenda with increasing aggressiveness through
bilateral pacts, but that the United States alone seemed so focused on
IP matters.


--------

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/03/business/iprtrade.php

--------

*U.S. plays it tough on copyright rules*

*
By Brian Knowlton* International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2005

*WASHINGTON*
<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=WASHINGTON&sort=swishrank>
The United States collides with its allies on many issues these days,
from waging war in Iraq to failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming. But one area where the Bush administration is aggressively
pursuing a policy that will have effects for decades to come is little
discussed: the enforcement of copyrights.

So determined is the United States to strengthen copyright and patent
protection that it is, in effect, exporting its own standards through
free trade agreements reached with countries or regions as diverse as
Australia, Singapore and Central America.

In the process of defending the lucrative exporting of American ideas
and U.S. rules on who owns what and for how long, Washington seems
prepared even to offend its allies.

In Australia, for example, the trade agreement that took effect on Jan.
1 has altered the prices and practices for prescription drugs. Experts
say the full effect will take three to 10 years to emerge.

In essence, a country where the state determines the cost of drugs is
now more beholden to protect the rights of U.S. pharmaceutical companies
to drugs pioneered and patented in America.

Creative works that had passed into the public domain in Australia, like
"Gone With the Wind," are now subject to U.S.-style copyright terms. The
Music Council of Australia said the agreement seemed to "change
Australian law to match United States law, possibly more for the benefit
of the U.S. than Australia."

"The rules we apply around the world," said James Mendenhall, acting
general counsel for the U.S. trade representative, "are rules that are
needed around the world."

It has been U.S. policy since the 1980s to actively extend ownership
rights for products like movies and music around the world.

But the Bush administration appears to have grown increasingly
frustrated with slow international procedures and has turned to trade
agreements as an alternative means of energetic enforcement.

Washington now routinely tries to negotiate U.S.-level protections for
digital products as well.

Language from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which became part of
U.S. law in 1998, is included in trade agreements in an attempt to
prevent digital duplication of creative works.

Agreements with Australia, Chile, Singapore and, most recently, the six
countries in the Central American Free Trade Agreement incorporate
language based on the digital copyright law.

Kevin Outterson, a law professor at West Virginia University who has
written on intellectual property rights, is among those who suggest that
this may be pushing the rights to ideas too far.

"The United States is unique among Western, highly industrialized
countries in being so uniquely focused on IP rights without thinking at
all about what I call IP duties," he said. "It is as if there was no
balance to IP rights, as if these were uniquely absolute. And they are
not."

Outterson suggested that neither governments nor corporations may be
able to answer the key question dispassionately: "What is the limit to
intellectual property rights?"

"No one in industry wants to ask, 'Where's the proper balance?"' he
said. And yet economists acknowledge that "there must be a point at
which intellectual property rights have gone too far."

F.M. Scherer, a Harvard economist, was less sympathetic to the cause of
countries trading with the United States. "Presumably they're big boys,"
he said. "They know what their interests are. They have to weigh the
quid pro quos."

But trade negotiations can provide potent leverage for the United States
when dealing with countries which seek closer ties.

In Australia, industry representatives had sought a 20-year extension of
copyright protections, to 70 years after the death of the creator from
50 - similar to a change made by the United States in 1998, just in time
to save Mickey Mouse from passing into the public domain.

Yet in 2000, the Australian government agreed with an advisory committee
of the Australian Parliament in opposing such an extension, according to
the Parliament's Web site. Three years later, the trade minister, Mark
Vaile, reaffirmed the government's opposition to a 70-year standard,
saying that "a whole constituency" did not want it.

Yet just such a change was included in the U.S.-Australia Free Trade
Agreement that took effect on Jan. 1. "We dumped it into Australia" via
the trade agreement, Outterson said.

And there are hopes the United States can go even further than that. The
advisory committee to the U.S. trade representative for the Australia
talks is dominated by representatives of music, media and other
industries who will gain from copyright extension. "We urge that future
agreements move that level to the full 95 years," the panel said in one
of the reports that such presidentially appointed trade panels issue
regularly.

In the case of Australia, it can perhaps be argued that a wealthy
society should pay, as consumers do in the United States, to enjoy the
benefits of an idea. But should the logic of strong U.S. demands apply
to smaller countries?

"Does it really make sense for countries who really are producing very
little IP of their own to be signing on to the strongest IP standards in
the world?" Lael Brainard of the Brookings Institution asked. "What's
the advantage to them?"

Mendenhall of the U.S. trade representative's office said, "Strong IP
protection brings investment into the market." In Jordan, an early U.S.
trade agreement partner, "what we've seen since that time is an
acceleration of the flowering of Jordan's industry," he said.

"They export a lot more," he said. "They're financially a lot stronger.
They've actually thrived since those protections were introduced."

James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology said the U.S. push for
its own IP standards - which he called "very, very aggressive" and "very
controversial" - might be coming at an unduly high cost in other areas.
The Central American trade accord included modest U.S. concessions on
sugar, for example, to the surprise of some analysts, who had expected
less.

Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry
Association of America, said the trade pacts "embody a new level of
standards for the digital age that go beyond the standards of existing
international agreements."

It was only proper for the administration in Washington to "protect that
most dynamic part of the U.S. economy," he said. Copyright-linked
industries account for 5 percent of American gross domestic product, he
estimates.

The question with software and digital protections, as with
pharmaceutical restrictions, is whether the protection of first world
industries, advanced with first world clout, works to the detriment of
at least some in developing countries. One reason advanced for the
failure of poor African nations to treat AIDS victims, for example, has
been the high cost of patented drugs, and the reluctance or downright
opposition of pharmaceutical companies to the substitution of much
cheaper generic drugs manufactured in countries like Brazil or India.

Even an advanced country like Australia is a net importer of products
deriving from copyrighted or patented ideas. Thus, it is unclear what it
gains from tighter rules.

Love, who has advised other countries in their negotiations with the
United States, said the pattern of negotiations on the free trade
agreements seemed aimed at creating a strong, geographically distributed
network of support for U.S. standards.

This pattern, he asserted, seems "exactly designed to have someone in
every regional area with U.S. norms imposed on them" - to form a growing
floor for future international negotiations. "They're just
steamrollering the whole world," he said.

He added that the Americans were hardly alone among industrialized
countries in pushing their agenda with increasing aggressiveness through
bilateral pacts, but that the United States alone seemed so focused on
IP matters.

In Australia, the lengthy intellectual property provisions of the trade
agreement were perhaps its most controversial parts. "A bilateral trade
agreement," the Australian Writers' Guild said, "is not the forum
through which such monumental changes to Australian copyright policy
should have been made."

Thomas Faunce, a public health specialist and senior lecturer on the law
faculty at Australian National University in Canberra, said by e-mail
that many Australians were concerned that their health care choices, for
example, had been taken out of their hands.

"The U.S. pharmaceutical industry and U.S. government officials are both
running the line that Australians need to pay more for innovative
drugs," Faunce said. "This is frustrating for us because we are
accustomed to changes in health policy being driven by scientific
research or social justice concerns."