Slashdot Log In
U.S. Intellectual Property Law Goes Global
from the and-they-went-to-the-hague dept.
Representatives of "copyright holders" heavily outnumbered freedom advocates, as is typical at this kind of event, but the leadoff speaker, Michael Davis of the Progressive IP Law Association, started the session by talking about how hip-hop sampling would be killed by the Hague Convention if it is ratified in its present form, which has "fair use" provisions nearly as onerous as those contained in the DMCA.
Interestingly, Marilyn Cade of AT&T spoke out against much of the Hague Convention's intent; her company's concern, she said, is keeping global communications and ecommerce free and easy. A representative from Yahoo! was even more negative about this treaty, which would make U.S. authorities responsible for enforcing other countries' copyright and IP laws, and vice versa.
Think about this spectre, which another participant raised: a court in Moscow, Iran or China could decide something posted on a Web site based in the U.S. violated their countries' laws and, as Hague Convention signatories, demand that U.S. authorities force the Web site owner to remove the offending material. This is not a far-fetched idea; remember Yahoo! and the French government's objection to Nazi memorabilia sales?
At the other extreme, the American Society of Media Photographers loves the idea of a treaty that will help its members collect royalties from foreign media that use their images.
Not Just Speaking to the Peanut Gallery
I only counted 36 people in the audience; intellectual property issue discussions never draw mass attention. But the only audience that counted today was the U.S. Hague Convention delegation, and they were here, sitting up front, listening to every panelist's words, asking questions, and generally trying to learn what various constituencies want (and don't want) in the way of intellectual property treaties before they go off to the next negotiating session.
A Nationalized Movie Industry?
Jared Jussim of Sony Pictures talked at length about the "entrepreneurialism" of the movie business and how vigorous international copyright enforcement is needed to keep the movie business healthy. He said, "If we could have the Digital Millenium Copyright Act extended throughout the world, I would be ecstatic about it."
Jussim ranted hard about online freedom-seekers; he dumped on "professors" who "cite each others papers in a big circle" and how they are all "liars." Strong words. But that wasn't enough for the man. He directly stated that if movies or even pieces of them were distributed online or through other means not approved by the movie companies, the entire industry would eventually shut down; that "you would pay a tax" to finance government-produced movies; and that government flunkies would decide what movies got made and what you saw in theaters and on TV. Horrors!
The spectre of a government-controlled film industry obviously is enough to make any right-thinking person want to see all possible copyright protection added to every possible intellectual property treaty.
Faced with this potential evil, it is obvious that the ACLU and all those professors who yammer on about fair use, freedom of speech, constitutionality and similar silliness must be ignored.
Media Attention
The Washington Post showed up. A cameraman from TechTV shot a few moments worth of tape, without sound. One of the local tech newsletters sent a reporter. And me. These were all the "known" journalists I spotted, but others were taking notes, so who can say? Perhaps one of the quiet people in the front row was a secret representative of the Today Show, but somehow I doubt it.
The Hague Convention could make major changes in the way intellectual property and copyright laws are handled on an international scale, but "the public" probably won't hear about any of this -- and won't care if they do -- unless there is some sort of corporate aggression under the Hague Convention that affects as many people as the RIAA's anti-Napster actions. Then you'll see the big-time pundits weigh in. But at this point in the game, they are nowhere to be found.
Enter RMS, Stage Right
Richard M. Stallman, representing the League for Programming Freedom, was scheduled to take part in the afternoon session but he showed up shortly before lunch and was immediately buttonholed by the Washington Post reporter. He spent the lunch break charming a member of the trade delegation, who said she was surprised that she had not heard "strongly" before about any of the intellectual freedom concerns brought up today by Stallman and other panel members. And listen to Stallman she did, with total concentration, while eating a sandwich and drinking a soda on the front lawn of the Library of Congress's Adams Building.
Stallman was not alone in speaking about the rights of intellectual property creators and users. Laurie Racine, of the Red Hat-sponsored Center for the Public Domain, did a turn, as did representatives of the Trial Lawyers of America, a blacksuited young attorney from the MPAA, Jamie Love from the Consumer Project on Technology, people from BMI, ASCAP,AAP, and other "interested parties."
Love brought up a hypothetical situation: Cuba copyrighting the "cuban beat" and demanding 5% royalties from all American music performers who use it -- and under the terms of the proposed Hague treaty, having the legal right to force U.S. officials to help them collect.
But proceedings like this one are basically dominated by lawyers. "What if?" questions get asked and debated. Ties between copyright laws and other cross-border civil and criminal situations get discussed in detail so excruciating that it could make non-smokers want to take up the habit just to have an excuse to slip outside for a few minutes now and then.
Not Just the U.S.
Even if the U.S. delegation to the Hague Convention come down totally on the side of the angels, they will still be just one of many delegations, and other countries may have other ideas. A number of people here today have talked about how, when it comes to copyrights and patents, the U.S. is one of the most restrictive nations around, so American copyright holders probably have more to fear on that front from the rest of the world than the rest of the world has to fear from us.
Where ordinary Americans may lose out is on freedom of speech issues. Many countries have far more restrictive policies on libel and on what citizens may or may not say about touchy subjects like politics or religion, especially if those opinions are published on the Internet.
RMS vs. Sony
Imagine Stallman being accused of "not speaking for the public" on copyright matters by Sony's Jussim -- who also managed to get in a plug for movies being a great entertainment value compared to live theater or professional sports. Imagine Stallman calmly -- aside from a gleam in his eyes -- reminding the poor flak that more money goes to promote movies than to make them, so that more money in the studios' pockets wouldn't necessarily lead to better movies.
This was the first moment of passion in over an hour. Sadly, it only lasted a moment. Then it was back to drone, drone, drone.
"The ISP Community" and "The Content Community" were phrases that got thrown a lot. In the legal sense, we heard, the question of whether "publication" takes place on a server or on the client where it is displayed hasn't been settled yet.
And so on.
Toward the end of the day Jamie Love said, "There hasn't been a single American newspaper article about this treaty, and here you are getting ready to create the Magna Carta of cyberspace."
Love didn't blame the people on the U.S. delegation for working in comparative secret. "I've called reporter after reporter [about this] and their eyes glaze over," he said.
So Slashdot was there. And if you want to read the text of this treaty, it's online here.
And if you are a U.S. citizen who wants to get in touch with the people representing you at the next Hague Convention meeting (in June), three good people to contact are:
Jennifer Lucas at USPTO (jennifer.lucas@uspto.gov)
Jeffrey D. Kovar at U.S. Dept. of State (kovarj@ms.state.gov)
Maneesha Mithal at the Federal Trade Commission (mmithal@ftc.gov)
Will US ban nazi web sites? Or porn sites? (Score:4)
Conversely, will the US allow its citizens to download porn of 17 year olds without question from Amsterdam web sites, where such materials are legal? Surely the US will respect other nations laws as much as we wish them to respect ours, right?
Computer industry always under-represented (Score:4)
I would advocate support of groups such as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation [eff.org] by going to their website now and joining, thus helping them fight the good fight. I have.
--
Only popular speech would be so protected (Score:3)
Only popular speech would garner such protection
But what about the ten thousand other people, little guys like you and I who never draw the atteniton of more than a dozen friends and acquaintances? We would enjoy no such protections
Don't kid yourself. This sort of thing will tip the scales immensly to favor censorship and corporate content control over an individual's right to free speech. One or two poster children notwithstanding, the vast majority of us will be forced into doing what the Copyright Cartels have been demanding for the last two years: "Get your bitch asses back on the couch and shut the hell up."
You, like I, may refuse to go back to a passive existence as a couch potato without a fight, and certainly not without complaint, but in the end, do either of us, much less the many thousands of others so affected, have the wealth to mount anything even approaching an effective defense against such an onslaught? I sincerely doubt it.
Hogwash (Score:5)
Hogwash.
Put another way: for a useless piece of legislation, Copyright Law certainly has allowed some very powerful, and very wealthy, Copyright Cartels to form (RIAA, MPAA, etc.), all without the "global standardization" you seem to hold in such high regard.
One of the unwritten checks and balances on the current IP system has been the diversity of intellectual property law, which has allowed certain documents which would otherwise have been completely suppressed using one nation's laws or another to remain a part of the global information sphere. This check isn't enough to reign in the ever more draconian intellectual property regimes of the west, but it has allowed information to get out, into the public hands, where it could do some good despite efforts at outright censorship based in no small part one copyright law of one location or another.
Imagine Chinese copyright law claiming ownership of any footage containing any Chinese Officials or Uniformed troups. Tiannamen Square would never have seen the light of day. Those are the kinds of unconstitutional (in the USA) laws which the treaty will require our government to enforce. What little regard the authorities in the US have left for the constitution will be swept under the rug with the all-encompassing excuse "the Hague Convention requires us to take these actions." Yes, someone, somewhere may have the cash and be willing to put the rest of their life on the line to fight such actions, and perhaps the supreme court will even see its way past its own petty politics to uphold the constitution (although there recent track record is anything but promising in this regard), but in the meantime we will all have been very effectively stripped of what few rights we have. Ditto for every other nation on the planet.
All these freedoms, and the sacrifices of our forefathers they represent, squandered, simply to preserve the outdated business models of organizations that produce the least worthwile things in our culture: popular music and Hollywood tripe.
Re:It wouldn't be enforced (Score:3)
In Singapore, which is considered to be a first world nation, they have shops (sometimes 2-3 in a row) in the major arcades that just sell pirated software. It's all quite open and seemingly accepted. The only time I ever saw anything to the contrary was when all the pirate shops suddenly shut down at once. Apparently they'd been tipped off about a raid.
I can't imagine a "less developed nation" wanting to, or being able to, enforce IP law, if a technological mecca like Singapore can't manage it.
skribe
Re:Global Government Now! (Score:3)
I'm all for free trade. But if I wanted to live under another country's laws, I figured I'd have to move there, rather than they would bring the law here.
We can have trade -- even free trade -- without this kind of mess.
- - - - -
Global Government Now! (Score:4)
At the risk of waking up the conspiracy theorists, this is one more step towards a global government. The whole idea of treaties like this is to bind together the member governments. Treay here, treaty there, and after a while all the gaps are sewn shut.
George Washington: Internationalism -- derided as "globalism" and falsely presented as "free trade" (as opposed to "sanctioned and licensed trade", which it is), is going in exactly the direction George Washington warned against. More entangling alliances. Less sovreignty.
- - - - -
Re:Treaties vs US Constitution? (Score:4)
Start your own Country... (Score:3)
Just a round table discussion.. not the real thing (Score:3)
Its probably going to be a long time (perhaps even after hell freezes over) before we could get most of the world to recognize everyone's copyright laws. I wouldn't hold my breath for this one...
It WILL be enforced. (Score:5)
It's working, too. There's an annual report on compliance with the TRIPS agreement [ustr.gov] describing countries that the US is putting the screws on for not being tough enough on content piracy.
It wouldn't be enforced (Score:5)
My opinion - Don't worry too much.
The Yahoo! ruling has nothing to do with the govt (Score:3)
Dear Roblio, dear
For the 15340398th time: the Yahoo! ruling has nothing to do with the French government. The French justice is completely independent from the government. In this specific ruling, a bunch of bigots have found a sympathetic judge who has a very peculiar and twisted interpretation of French (mild) laws on racial hatred.
It's amazing how this kind of misinformation can be resilient.
And, BTW, at least the French did not force Yahoo! to remove their porn videos pages, but others oh-so-free did...
Canada's Healthy Perspective (Score:3)
Faced with this potential evil
Im not sure what you mean but:
I am Canadian. I am happy and proud that Canada's National Film Board [www.nfb.ca] and CRTC [crtc.gc.ca] exist to assist film makers and artists create their works. Art and film is valuable to a healthy culture and should be publicly supported. For profit films are mostly not art - they would be profit vehicles first, creative works second.
End of the current entertainment industry (Score:3)
These people don't realize just how unecessary they are to the world ;-) Various industries have come and gone through history, why not this overpriced, fat cat infested, tax loop hole subsidized, silly, and uncreative one?
Do they think that 100,000 people with digital editing suites (how many installations of those kinds of programs are out there I wonder), and next generation video cameras can't produce their own entertainment? Rap music performers did as much with less equipment. Now that I think of it why are there 3 or 4 big studios and not 500,000 small ones. Small restaurants seem to be able to cook and prepare food that is often better than many multinational chains; is it impossible that the same conditions might obtain in movie production?
Since the industry is so uncreative that half of its product consists in remaking foreign films in American English, ripping off independent film makers or filming the same story over and over (4 movies about comets destroying the earth; 4 movies about invasions from outer space; 4 movies about *humorous* invasions from outer space ... and on and on ...) who would really miss it?
Re:Global Government Now! (Score:3)
A single unitary globe may not be the answer, yet, but in a world where communication is instant and transportation is approaching the same level, we can't exactly act on George Washington's advice. Isolationism worked wonders between WWI and WWII eh? Oh wait, a Great Depression and an exodus of American artistic talent. I forgot all abou that. There once was a contingent that fought for state sovreignty, but like national isolationism, it failed. Hell, "federalism" as we know it is a joke. Education is one of the few areas where states reign supreme and it's a mess. Claiming that nations won't one day be as close as the United States are now is ignorance. You could point to unreconcilable differences between certain nations, but I can just as easily point to the conflict between Kansas and Missouri that ended as interstate cooperation increased. I'm nearly as liberal as they come, but it's hard to support unrelenting isolationism.
Re:It wouldn't be enforced (Score:4)
While I do worry about the loss of sovereignty to the other countries (of course, they do not have to sign the treaty...) I am in favor of cracking down on software piracy in particular. Piracy is anti-competative in that a pirated copy of Windows (to use an example) could be blocking a copy of Linux just as easily as it could be blocking a licen$ed copy of Window$. THe more emplasis on enforcing the copyright laws, the better chance Linux has of taking the markets abroad and here in the US. (China is a great example of this, BTW-- 90% of the OSs sold are pirated copies of Windows, and of the legit OSs, 99.5% are Linux...).
That being said, DMCA is a bad law and poses a significant threat to computer security, fair use, and other issues in the mid to long term. I hope that other countries are not so sheepish as not to stand up against this one. Also, what right do we have to force other countries to adopt our policies? What right do we have to pretend to be the sovereigns of the globe?
Global Big Brotherism (Score:3)
The only way they can enforce these fascist laws to the letter is by instituting Orwellian forms of governments around the world. If that happens, we should all rise up and kick their collective Orwellian arses.
The internet is your weapon. Copy it all and download it all!
Re:It WILL be enforced. (Score:4)
It's funny ... (Score:5)
... and when they came for me, there was no one left to complain.
Copy? Right! (Score:4)
Submitting a patent for idiocy,
Only the Corps. get represented... (Score:4)
The article makes mention that the public just aren't interested. That's untrue. There is a sizable minority of people who do care--even if it's only 1% of the public who cares at all, that's still 3 million Americans. That's a lot of people.
The problem is, none of them has any idea when things like this happen. I think this is roughly the fourth event I've heard of on
Something like that could have happened. Likewise, the protest against the DMCA that happened a long while back, where a disappointing 20 people showed up, could have been a major event. Why wasn't it? No one knew.
I could have come, and I'm sure there are others here who would have been glad to make a great turn-out. But instead of telling us beforehand, Slashdot whines about it after. I mean, come on! There are a lot of people who read this site who could take half a day or a day off every once in a while to participate in issues like this. But "News for Nerds" only tells us things that have already happened, complaining about how no one cares. Well, if they'd tell us a week beforehand, we could actually be there to participate.
There really ought to be a section of politically aware sites like
So, how about it? How many people would like to see a calendar page about upcoming political events that have significance to us? What do you think? There's a large readership here, and if only a small percentage turn out...it could be noticed. But that's just my opinion.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
Excellent... lets use this. (Score:4)
Sure, it's absurd, but you know someone is going to try pulling something like that.
Slashdot.org, the DDoS of the GNU Generation.