In DRANT # 304, I wrote about ACTA-
please check it out here.
Yesterday, the G-8 countries put it officially on the table.
The right to peer inside your iPod
An agreement on intellectual property rights to be ratified by the G8 heads of government highlights conflicts between ownership and privacy
Photograph: Nick Veasey/Getty Images
The heads of the G8 governments, meeting this week, are about to ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta), which - it's claimed - could let customs agents search your laptop or music player for illegally obtained content. The European Parliament is considering a law that would lead to people who illicitly download copyrighted music or video content being thrown off the internet. Virgin Media is writing to hundreds of its customers at the request of the UK record industry to warn them that their connections seem to have been used for illegal downloading. Viacom gets access to all of the usernames and IP addresses of anyone who has ever used YouTube as part of its billion-dollar lawsuit in which it claims the site has been party to "massive intentional copyright infringement".
It seems that 20th-century ideas of ownership and control - especially of intellectual property such as copyright and trademarks - are being reasserted, with added legal muscle, after a 10-year period when the internet sparked an explosion of business models and (if we're honest) casual disregard, especially of copyright, when it came to music and video.
But do those separate events mark a swing of the pendulum back against the inroads that the internet has made on intellectual property?
'A finger in the dyke'
Saul Klein, a venture capitalist with Index Ventures who has invested in the free database company MySQL, Zend (the basis of the free web-scripting language PHP) and OpenX, an open-source advertising system, is unconvinced. "In a world of abundance - which the internet is quintessentially - that drives the price of everything towards 'free'," he says. "People don't pay for any content online. Not for music, not for video. They get it, either legally or illegally."
Is that sustainable? "The model of suing your best customers and subpoenaing private information is doomed to failure," Klein observes. "It's putting a finger in the dyke. It won't change the macro trend, which is that there's an abundance of information. Copyright owners need to find new ways to generate income from their product. The fact is, the music industry is in rude health - more people than ever before are going to concerts, making it, listening to it. It's the labels that are screwed. The artists and managers are making money. The labels aren't.
"What is broken is the paid-for model for content, though it won't go away entirely. We look to invest in scarcity, where people will pay a premium for something not in abundance." He gives the example of Viagogo - a ticket-selling site that Index Ventures has invested in: "Selling tickets for Madonna or Prince capitalises on the public's interest in paying for scarcity." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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G-8 Declarations on Economy, Environment
Read the Group of Eight's declarations on the world economy and the environment and climate change.
"Protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
17. Effective promotion and protection of IPR are critical to the development of creative products, technologies and economies. We will advance existing anti-counterfeiting and piracy initiatives through, inter alia, promoting information exchange systems amongst our authorities, as well as developing non-binding Standards to be Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement (SECURE) at the World Customs Organization. We encourage the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year. We will promote practical cooperation between our countries to develop tools to combat new techniques in counterfeiting and piracy and spread best practices. We reaffirm our commitment on government use of software in full compliance with the relevant international agreements and call on other countries to follow our commitment."
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Public Knowledge - Blogging, Events, and Action Alerts
G8 Endorses ACTA: Great, so what’s in it?
Sherwin Siy
Today, 05:39 PM
In its “Declaration on the World Economy”, the G-8 included an endorsement of ACTA and ongoing efforts to “standardize” IP enforcement through customs organizations. “We encourage the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year,” the statement says.
So we have a major endorsement of ACTA from the leadership of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And pressure to have this international legal agreement ready to roll at the end of the year. So what’s going to be in this critically important, possibly binding international agreement, to be completed in less than six months?
We have no idea.
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ACTA PUBLIC COMMENTS--One-Stop Shop
Ari Abramowitz
Today, 04:11 PM
We recently scanned all of the documents filed in response to the USTR’s request for public comments regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). They are presented below, if sometimes angularly, as well as on our issue summary page here. The USTR’s initial “fact sheet,” request for public comment, and the leaked “discussion paper” are also included.
• USTR’s Fact Sheet (October, 2007)
• USTR’s Notice for Public Comments (February, 2008)
• The Leaked “Discussion Paper” (leaked May, 2008)
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Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Webmaster
Thursday, 11:40 AM
ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated by the US, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. The stated goal of the agreement is the international enforcement of strong intellectual property rights through increased cooperation and coordination among international governmental agencies. ACTA does not yet exist, though its ongoing discussions are confirmed by all of the participating governments.
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What Does NebuAd Know About You? What Doesn't It?
Art Brodsky
Yesterday, 10:00 PM
While the full United States Senate on Wednesday (July 9) takes up the subject of wiretapping by the government, the Senate Commerce Committee will take up the subject of wiretapping by private industry. It’s a tossup which one is more scary.
The Senate votes July 9 on the bill to grant the Executive Branch almost unlimited authority to wiretap private citizens without any judicial oversight. The Commerce Committee will hear testimony from Robert Dykes, the chairman of NebuAd, a controversial company recently in the news because his group came up with a novel way of getting detailed information about Internet users. NebuAd wasn’t satisfied to get information only from a customer’s use of one Web site. Instead, they want to see everything that a Web surfer does online.
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