While here in North America everyone is still slapping each other on the back over the slap down that both SOPA and PIPA got in Congress the reality is that the over intent behind what those two bills stood for hasn’t stopped as evidenced by the more global ACTA treaty.

Unlike the two American bills however ACTA is still on the move to being accepted by governments around the world with the current signatories including: Canada, Australia, Japan, United States, Morocco, New Zealand and Singapore. That doesn’t mean that it is clear sailing for ACTA as protests against it have spread across Europe and several key countries pulling out of the treaty agreement.

This past weekend saw a huge multi-country protest with thousands of people coming out to march against the signing of the treaty. The current number of protests and protesters sits at:

• Germany – 25,000
• Sofia, Bulgaria – 4,000
• Bucharest, Romania – 300
• Warsaw, Poland – 500
• Paris, France – 1,000
• Prague, Czech Republic – 1,500
• Cluj, Transylvania – 2,000
• Budapest, Hungary – 1,000
• Vilnius, Lithuania – 600
• London, England – 200

As much as the proponents of ACTA would like us to believe that this is just about copyright and piracy just as they tried with SOPA and PIPA the fact is a lot more. As James Plafke from Geekosystem put it recently

A general concern with ACTA is that could make ISPs responsible for their users’ copyright infringements, which would lead to ISPs implement some kind of nefarious surveillance in order to protest themselves. Along with that, users could end up blacklisted from ISPs if they’re caught infringing on copyright a few times, and as we know, copyright infringement is a mucky territory to delve into, and you might be taking part in it without actually being aware you are.

Thankfully the number of countries in Europe that have either withdrawn support for ACTA or are reconsidering their position on it is growing as the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia have delayed proceeding on the treaty.

via Geekosystem

The European ACTA revolt draws large number of protesters is a post from: The Inquisitr

Here at The Inquisitr we have been covering the whole SOPA, PIPA, and the Blackout of the Web but even before those two extremely flawed bills surfaced we were covering the international treaty commonly referred to by ACTA, even though all the trade organizations (funded by the entertainment industry) did their best to keep secret.

Most recently both James Johnson and H. Scott English wrote about the re-emergence of ACTA as a real matter of concern. The fact is that ACTA is even more insidious that either SOPA and PIPA might have been before they were shelved.

I first started writing about ACTA back in 2010 here at The Inquisitr and have been a vocal opponent of the treaty because it totally bypasses the direct involvement of elected politicians that could be held accountable for their actions. It is because of this problem with accountability that ACTA was never created as “a law” but rather as a “trade treaty” – as I wrote here in April 2010:

So why a trade agreement?

The simple answer to that question is – the laws; and legal rights, are getting in the way.

The entertainment industry has been trying in the US – with a lot of campaign bucks being donated – to get the laws changed to something more in their favor but there is this pesky thing called the Constitution as well as the Supreme Court that keeps getting in the way. While that hasn’t stopped them it has made their task a lot more difficult.

Then you have all those really irritating foreign countries with their own silly laws. They’ve tried in Canada to influence our government by donating as much as they possibly can, by whatever means they can, to favorable political candidates running for office. There influence has also been felt in other countries around the world but in the end – or at least at this point in time the standing laws of those countries are proving more difficult to get around than the entertainment industry would like.

With all these headaches why not find another way to get what you want and not have to deal with these piddling laws which is what the industry has done. You see in the Global Economy trade agreements trump local laws. You might not think so but in reality they do. Just look at any WTO disagreements, in the end the WTO trade agreements will trump local laws – hint: the current battle between the US and Antigua over online gambling.

So rather than have to constantly fight against the constantly shifting landscape of local laws the entertainment industry realized it was much easier to engineer a global trade agreement outside of even the WTO, WIPO and other related world trade organizations typical responsible for this type of thing. By doing so they have in effect created a global trade agreement that could marginalize or replace the WIPO.

Fast forward to today and we suddenly find that an interesting situation has arisen in the Untied States in regards to ACTA. It seems that President signed the ACTA treaty a few months ago, with apparently little or no fanfare, but questions are now being asked by those who do keep a very close eye on this – was Obama even allowed to sign ACTA?

It has been pointed out that any treaty between the US and any other country, which is exactly what ACTA is, requires Senate approval – which ACTA never got. What it did get was a change in semantics where is was now being called an “executive agreement” so that President Obama didn’t need Senate approval.

However, and this is where the constitution comes into play, this “treaty” is about intellectual property (supposedly) and as Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out the president cannot legally sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and that it must be submitted to the Senate.

That said, even if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the president legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.

This is why Senator Wyden has asked the President to explain why Congress has been cut out. Scholars have noted their concern that if allowed, this will open the door to allowing the president to regularly route around Congress on international agreements.

I have said before and I will say it again – the success against SOPA and PIPA is only the opening skirmish of a much bigger war being waged around intellectual property. ACTA has been in the background for sometime but now that SOPA and PIPA have been shelved (temporarily) the fight needs to be now directed against the much more insidious and global version called ACTA.

However the question is now before us .. did President Obama knowingly and intentionally sidestep the US Congress in order to placate the entertainment industry; and in doing this did he break United States Constitutional law?

Did Obama break constitutional law by signing the ACTA treaty? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The streets of Warsaw were flooded with protesters on Tuesday as Poland’s leaders voiced their support for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement better known as ACTA.

The international copyright treaty has been called by some groups worse then SOPA and PIPA.

Groups throughout the region fear that ACTA will lead to online censorship in much the same way as SOPA and PIPA and they voiced their anger by marching on government buildings while several popular websites went dark in protest.

Sites that went dark in protest including www.wykop.pl which placed a banner on the site that read:

“Under the banner of fighting piracy and concerns about intellectual property, ACTA will limit the rights of each of us.”

In the meantime Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said the government will not give in to protesters as was the case in the United States when support for SOPA and PIPA was quickly pulled as negative news coverage. Must like SOPA and PIPA the ACTA bill is well supported by the producers of music, movies and various goods, all of which would enjoy further protection under the bill.

At a news conference in support of ACTA the Prime Minister sternly noted:

“There will be no concessions to brutal blackmail.”

Because of various similarities ACTA shares with the Stop Online Piracy Act  (SOPA) a group calling itself anonymous (this has yet to be confirmed) began attacking various Polish government websites, shutting some down on Sunday and well into Monday night.

If the Polish government sticks to its guns as it has promised ACTA will be signed into law in Tokyo on Thursday.

The bill once signed into law will be active in a number of industrialized countries that have been seeking a way to fight counterfeiting and IP theft.

ACTA was already signed in October by the United States, Tokyo, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco and Singapore.

President Obama and former President Bush have both voiced their support for ACTA as a matter of “national security.”

Do you think ACTA is a mistake or a needed measure to stop counterfeiting of goods around the world?

ACTA Protests In Full Force As Websites Go Dark And Citizens Take To The Streets is a post from: The Inquisitr

Now that all the back slapping and virtual high-five’ing over making Congress backtrack on SOPA and PIPA is over with one has to wonder what is next because if you think that this is the end of it you are living in a dream world. Either as a reworked bill or just the same thing with a different name we are going to see the entertainment bought Congress try to pass something similar.

It’s a good feeling to think that we have actually had an effect on government policy but the reality is that unless we step up our opposition to anything like this crap that rears up its ugly they will get something like this passed into law.

The question is – what can we do to keep up the pressure and maybe even take the fight to those companies behind policies like SOPA or PIPA?

Well the folks behind a new site called MegaUprising have an idea and they are calling it Black March and it a movement to get right in the face of those entertainment companies pushing draconian and hurtful policies; and where it counts the most – in their bottom line.

Now before you discount this as just some other nerd trying to get some web brownie points you have to realize who some of the people supporting MegaUprising are. Three of the main groups supporting the site and the movement are the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and Creative Commons.

So what is Black March then?

From their initial post about the movement

Another protest is building steam. This time, its a boycott aimed directly at big media, calledBlack March. For the entire month of march, consumers are encouraged to not buy any media. Personally, I like the idea of this even better than the web blackout, as effective as it was. Sony, Disney, Fox, Paramount and the WB seem to think they are invulnerable because we, as consumers, have grown so dependent on them for our entertainment. Hopefully, a good participation level will show them exactly how wrong they are.

They are also propose that any boycott should also include “occupying” theaters, DVD rental stores, and any other brick and mortar that makes money by selling products and service from companies that support things like SOPA and PIPA.

Additionally, as we found out, there are a large number of non-entertainment industries that supported SOPA and PIPA and some are suggesting that they also be boycotted. The problem is that it is very difficult to identify all the products from the companies who supported the policies; unless you own an Android smartphone that is.

If you also want to engage in this type of product activism you can head over to the Android Market and grab yourself a copy of Boycott SOPA which will let you scan in the barcode for any product and be able to find out if the company behind the product is a supporter of SOPA and PIPA.

I really hope that people get behind these kinds of ideas and actually make their voice heard through their wallets because that is what companies like these really hear and care about, as do the politicians.

Never mind worrying about the Ides of March because Black March is coming is a post from: The Inquisitr

The demise of SOPA and PIPA, as temporary as it may be,  means attention is now turning to ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).  ACTA is a trade agreement that has already been signed by the United States and is even worse than SOP/PIPA.  Trade Agreements do not require the same type of scrutiny that bills and laws do so ACTA was able to squeak by unnoticed. Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States are all signatories, but pressure is already being applied to other countries to join. The EU has not yet signed ACTA but has to do so before May 2013.

The BRIC group of emerging nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China – are not part of the ACTA movement and have no serious incentive to join.  The Indian government may even be forming a movement to counter the act.

As with SOPA and PIPA, ACTA takes a fairly bland idea – the right of companies to profit from their own intellectual property – and turns it into a governmental power grab and an excuse to weaken privacy on the Internet. The reason the activists are turning their attention to ACTA is that it provides the basis to criminalize almost any online activity. ACTA will give governments and large corporations the pretext to shut down any site, and imprison its owners, should there be political or corporate objections to that site’s content.Imagine a site runs a political story which is objectionable to someone in power. The site perhaps can’t be shut down because of that story, but ACTA will allow the authorities to find some other obscure breach that can be used. That’s also true of SOPA and PIPA.

Watch this video which explains the danger of ACTA.

ACTA Worse than SOPA and Classified as National Security by Obama and Bush is a post from: The Inquisitr

Dear President Obama,

I am writing this open letter to you in the hopes that you might be able to explain why it is that the United States Government is so actively trying to hide all information regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

I remember when you were elected as the president of your great country that I, like a lot of people suddenly had high hopes for the United States after the dark years of the Bush Administration. You see even though I might be a Canadian the fact that for the first time in its history your country saw past the color barrier and elected a black president. That, on top of your election platform, gave not only your country great pause but the rest of the world as well.

But increasingly the hopes and dreams of your election seem to becoming more of an illusion. I’m not referring to your recent healthcare victory but rather your government’s stance on matters that are going to have far ranging effects on the world as a whole.

Sure everyone is pre-occupied with your recent discussions regarding the nuclear issue which I must say is providing great cover for what is potentially the most far ranging slaughter of copyright and intellectual property laws we have ever seen. Yet your government is doing everything it can to make sure that any agreements reached remain a secret.

This from a government that promised its people, and by extension the people of the world, that there would be a new transparency with your government but increasingly we seem to be finding it is actually quite the opposite.

Nowhere is this more evident than when the subject of ACTA comes up as James Love recently found when he requested under your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) only to be told that documents pertaining to ACTA were considered state secrets (pdf of denial letter)

Today we received this letter from the White House, Office of the United States Trade Representative. Our FOIA request was denied on the grounds that the documents are “information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

As well as Canada’s esteemed Professor of Internet and E-Commerce Law Michael Geist pointed out today that the US is the primary force behind the increasing effort to pull all future discussions surround ACTA back into the shadows

The text of the treaty can be released without regard for the level of agreement on substantive issues.  Yet unlike most other ACTA countries that have called for transparency without condition, the U.S. has set conditions that effectively seeks to trade its willingness to release the text for gains on the substance of the text.  The only thing needed to reach consensus on sharing the text with the public is for the U.S. to give the go-ahead.  This statement indicates they will only do so for a price.

I understand that the entertainment industry are really big contributors to election campaigns but they are also the driving force behind the original drafting of ACTA and its subsequent adoption by various friendly governments around the world – Canada included. However President Obama this self-same group of global entertainment conglomerates are using ACTA to perform an end-run around the laws of your country.

As I pointed out in an earlier post ACTA as an international trade agreement can be used as a great big club against countries who decide at some point that t he rights of the actual creators and the consumers are more important than the entertainment industry’s right to hold all content hostage. That includes the country that you are president of Mr. Obama.

This so-called trade agreement has the potential to forever change the copyright landscape and yet the United States Government sees fit to hide all the dealing to do with it behind a shroud of secrecy. Why is this President Obama especially in light of your promise of change and transparency?

If there was ever a time, ever a reason, for openness and total transparency ACTA is that time. If there was ever a time to keep your word to the American people ACTA is that time.

So how about it President Obama – can we have some of the truth and openness? Or does the entertainment industry truly hold the keys to power?

Sincerely,

Steven Hodson – concerned citizen of Canada who is about to get his rights stomped all over.

Dear President Obama: About this ACTA secrecy thing is a post from: The Inquisitr

In light if the FCC loss to Comcast in the courts Fred Wilson wrote an interesting post where he uses the phrase Internet Freedom and how it is an important concept for his company Union Square Ventures and how it impacts their investment thinking.

Our firm, Union Square Ventures, focuses most of our time on finding companies, investing in them, and working with the entrepreneurs to build them. But a few years ago, we made the decision to invest a small amount of our time on public policy issues, like net neutrality, patent reform, spectrum reform, immigration reform, and a handful of other ones. All of this and more is about Internet Freedom. Our business requires it. If we lose Internet Freedom, we won’t have any companies we would want to invest in and we’ll close up shop and move on with our lives. That would be our loss.

Noble words indeed.

Idealism versus citizens under siege

During this conversation around the FCC loss there was another big Internet Freedom action going on in Britain. I am of course referring to the Digital Economy Bill which was passed in their House of Parliament much to the horror of anyone involved with Internet policy and freedom. It wasn’t so much that it past but the fact that it was done so with next to no debate because of tactic used by the Labour Government to sneak it by in the quiet days leading up to their upcoming election.

Simon Mackie at GigaOm writes:

Shortly before midnight last night, the UK’s Labour Government finally managed to push through its Digital Economy Bill. It’s a controversial and wide-ranging piece of legislation that is aimed at tackling copyright infringement and, among other things, will force ISPs to cut off persistent file-sharers. Because the bill was forced through during the “washup” period before parliament is dissolved in advance of May’s General Election, there has been concern that the bill hasn’t been debated thoroughly, and not enough attention has been paid to its implications for digital freedoms — for example, the Bill could have the unintended consequence of forcing places like libraries and cafes to stop offering free Wi-Fi. It could also give the government the power to block sites like Wikileaks, just because it hosts copyright-infringing material.

On one hand we have the idealistic thoughts of Fred Wilson and on the other we have the total capitulation of a government to paranoia and draconian methods of trying to control one’s population.

However it doesn’t just stop with governments trying to control the Internet within their own borders as Canadians are finding out. In March I wrote on my Shooting at Bubbles blog about the pressure being exerted on our government by the European Union to change our laws regarding copyrights and intellectual property. In the post I quote Professor Michael Geist who said:

Given the magnitude of the proposed changes, the price of a trade agreement is clear.  The EU is effectively demanding that Canada surrender its sovereignty over intellectual property law and policy.

In effect we are being told that if we want to be able to play with everyone else on the global stage we had better be ready to forgo making our own laws and become a rubber stamp country.

One has to wonder how much worse things can get but unfortunately one doesn’t have to wonder for very long as the biggest threat to Fred Wilson’s idealism is already here waiting in the wings. As bad as one might think the Digital Economy Bill might be most of us think we can rest easy with the belief that this insanity is confined to Britain.

Think again because there is a global effort to make what we see with Britain’s Digital Economy Bill nothing but child’s play. It is an effort that makes the heavy handedness of the European Union look like a sing-a-long around a campfire and every attempt is being made to see it all happens in secret.

Building Frankenstein under NDA

So what is this global effort you ask. Well the acronym that it is going by is pretty innocent enough and even in its full glory it sounds on the surface as being a pretty noble goal.

The acronym is ACTA and it stands for: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Pretty innocuous sounding eh?

It is too, at least until you start looking it exactly what the agreement is all about, who is involved and how it is planned to be implemented. That is of course if you are lucky enough to be able to find out any information about this international agreement because all the meetings of the principals involved are held in secret. Not only that but anyone who wants to even lay eyes on the documents making up the global agreement are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)(pdf).

First, we agree that the documents relating to the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will be held in confidence. This means that the documents may be given only to government officials or persons outside government who participate in the party’s domestic consultation process and have a need to review or be advised of the information in these documents. Anyone given access to the documents will be alerted that they cannot share the documents with people not authorized to see them. The United States plans to hold ACTA documents in confidence for a fixed period of time after the negotiations conclude.

For the first time government officials and others involved are being bound to secrecy in the creation of a global trade agreement. As Prof. Geist points out this is something totally unheard of in the world stage – especially when it comes to trade agreements

In the face of widespread criticism of the lack of ACTA transparency, participating governments and music industry lobbyists have claimed that the transparency issue is much ado about nothing.  As governments seek to keep relevant information secret, those same governments released a joint statement last week arguing that “it is accepted practice during trade negotiations among sovereign states to not share negotiating texts with the public at large, particularly at earlier stages of the negotiation.”

It is important to emphatically state that this is simply not the case for many multilateral agreements and the activities of international organizations that typically serve as the forum for global agreement discussions.  U.S. NGO groups have made a strong case for how ACTA’s lack of transparency is out-of-step with many other global norm setting exercises.  With regard tointernational fora, they note that the WTO, WIPO, WHO, UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT, UNCTAD, OECD, Hague Conference on Private International Law, and an assortment of other conventions have all been far more open than ACTA.

It is only within the last year or two that the veil of secrecy has been lifted to a degree as more people have heard about the trade agreement and started raising a fuss. Even though there are an increasing number of politicians from around the world beginning to ask questions about ACTA the people and organizations behind it all are still trying to keep as much of a lid on access as they can.

So who is playing puppet master here?

As you may have noticed in the above quote there was the mention of the music industry as being one of the driving forces behind keeping this agreement as secret as possible. However it’s not just the music industry trying to hustle this agreement through but rather the whole US entertainment industry.

Right from the very beginning this has been a play by the entertainment industry to perform an end run around both American laws and other individual country laws as well. Their fingerprints are all over ACTA as it is their trade group lawyers who first drew up the originating agreement that was then put into the hands of satellite agencies which then shopped it to the required government officials in the participating countries, even if they are only called advisors.

At all points of the ACTA trail you will find that there has been the strong involvement of just about every entertainment trade group from the RIAA with their wishlist (which includes gutting the DCMA and licensing CD content providers) through to the movie companies wanting everything from stiffer sentences for people caught recording movies to the destruction of P2P networks.

So why a trade agreement?

The simple answer to that question is – the laws; and legal rights, are getting in the way.

The entertainment industry has been trying in the US – with a lot of campaign bucks being donated – to get the laws changed to something more in their favor but there is this pesky thing called the Constitution as well as the Supreme Court that keeps getting in the way. While that hasn’t stopped them it has made their task a lot more difficult.

Then you have all those really irritating foreign countries with their own silly laws. They’ve tried in Canada to influence our government by donating as much as they possibly can, by whatever means they can, to favorable political candidates running for office. There influence has also been felt in other countries around the world but in the end – or at least at this point in time the standing laws of those countries are proving more difficult to get around than the entertainment industry would like.

With all these headaches why not find another way to get what you want and not have to deal with these piddling laws which is what the industry has done. You see in the Global Economy trade agreements trump local laws. You might not think so but in reality they do. Just look at any WTO disagreements, in the end the WTO trade agreements will trump local laws – hint: the current battle between the US and Antigua over online gambling.

So rather than have to constantly fight against the constantly shifting landscape of local laws the entertainment industry realized it was much easier to engineer a global trade agreement outside of even the WTO, WIPO and other related world trade organizations typical responsible for this type of thing. By doing so they have in effect created a global trade agreement that could marginalize or replace the WIPO.

And why is ACTA dangerous?

Besides the fact that it is an overt act to subvert local country laws ACTA has the potential to change not just the Internet but in my opinion our very society. That might be an extreme view but I have been following this since it first broke back in 2008 (even though the process had already been underway for two years) and the secrecy aside the fact that this is conglomerate driven politics the entertainment industry is looking to take total and utter control of how we can access information.

As Prof. Geist wrote back in 2007 when word of ACTA first started to leak out

This treaty could ultimately prove bigger than WIPO – without the constraints of consensus building, developing countries, and civil society groups, the ACTA could further reshape the IP landscape with tougher enforcement, stronger penalties, and a gradual eradication of the copyright and trademark balance.

The fact is t hat there is nothing seen so far in ACTA that is of any benefit to you or I. If anything everything suddenly becomes stacked in the favor of the entertainment industry. It would be easy to slough this off and say its only about entertainment so it’s not going to affect the Internet or my life beyond watching movies or listening to music.

Think again as Rafael Ruffolo pointed out in November 2009

ACTA would basically change the way we all use the Internet and modern technology. The role of Internet Service Providers like Rogers Communications Inc. and Bell Canada Enterprises Inc. will also change, giving these companies unbelievable new powers to stop “copyright violations.”

For starters, ISPs will be forced to block anything that could be pirated material. The impact this will have on the music industry is obvious, but what about for software developers?

Maybe a start-up creates an app and decides to give it out for free to create some buzz. How will Rogers or Bell be able to differentiate this freeware software from pirated commercial software?

Oh and that three strikes law that everyone laughs at France for enacting? Guess what? ACTA would have the same law built into it. Now who’s laughing?

Scratching the surface

As much as Fred Wilson might want to believe in Internet Freedom and everyone is doing a lot of back patting because the FCC lost we are only seeing the surface of what ACTA portends as the majority of the work going into is still going on behind closed doors.

The truth is we probably won’t know how bad things will be until the trade agreement is signed by all the parties involved and for the US knowing what is involved is even less likely since the Obama government has ruled that all documents related to ACTA are state secrets as James Love found out.

There are number of outstanding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for key documents, by groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, and KEI. In one of our FOIA requests, we asked for 7 specific documents, referenced by the exact title and date of the documents. These documents are the proposals for the text of the agreement.

The texts are available to the Japanese government. They are available to the 27 member states of the European Union. They are available to the governments of Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia. They are available to Morocco, and many other countries. They are available to “cleared” advisers (mostly well connected lobbyists) for the pharmaceutical, software, entertainment and publishing industries. But they are a secret from you, the public.

Today we received this letter from the White House, Office of the United States Trade Representative. Our FOIA request was denied on the grounds that the documents are “information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

An international trade agreement is considered a state secret. That should given even the most callous observer pause so if you think that ACTA isn’t the most serious challenge to not just Internet Freedom but also some of your most fundamental rights then I suggest you find a nice comfortable sandpile and stick your head in it.

A timeline of ACTA since the first available documents became available – courtesy of Professor Michael Geist.

The ACTA Timeline on Dipity.

ACTA: The acronym hardly anyone knows yet should be scared to death of is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing that 2009 will go down in the history books for it will be regarding two things. The first is the all out assault against piracy around the world by the movie industry and their trade groups.

The second is that 2009 is going to be the year that the movie industry has made record profits at the box office.

So on one hand they are saying that piracy is killing their business which means we have to gut our existing copyright laws and other intellectual property laws so that the movie industry can take over lock stock and barrel.

Then on the other hand they stand to make $10.6 billion before the end of the year, and the numbers are still climbing.

The year’s runaway overall box-office tally keeps getting adjusted upward.

A week after announcing that the domestic theatrical market would push past $10 billion for the first time in 2009, and end the year at around $10.4 billion, industry tracker Hollywood.com Thursday revised its count to an astounding $10.6 billion.

And that’s a calendar-year figure, meaning the counting stops today. Adhering to a different 52 week calendar, studio distributors are actually counting this weekend (Jan. 1-3) on the 2009 books, at least domestically, so who knows how high the ultimate 2009 will end up, given the heat of “Avatar,” “Sherlock Holmes” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.”

According to Hollywood.com, the last week of the calendar year will conclude with nearly $500 million in domestic revenue, by far the biggest week ever at the North American box office.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter Thursday released data showing that foreign theatrical distribution also reached a new record in 2009, hitting $10.7 billion — an uptick of 8 percent over 2008.

Source: The Wrap

So let me get this straight. Piracy is a rampant beast that is killing the movie business and yet these self-same movie companies are setting record profits.

Can some-one please explain to me how it is that piracy is the great big monster it is being made out to be then?

Anyone?

Thought not and yet the road to ACTA continues unabated using this piracy argument as one of its driving forces. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.

Calling all movie industry dickwads – time to STFU about piracy killing your business is a post from: The Inquisitr

I realize that it is common practice come this time of year for us to all sit back and ruminate over all the wonderful and earthshaking things we have written about in the past year and to delve into the murky depths of the future and prognosticate using our incredibly sharp intellect what will happen in the year to come. Well I can’t stand doing that except in very rare occasions – and this is one of those years.

I’m not going to bother looking back because other than increasing pageviews possibly for all of a minute or two it is a boring and pointless exercise mainly because the majority of time, regardless of how we might spin our past words, we’re wrong. No, what I want to do is to look to 2010 and the one thing that will have the most profound effect on our lives and the Web.

It’s a prediction that will come as a result of events that have been happening for some time now but really has culminated in 2009 to create a foundation from which how we use the Web and what we can do there will be forever changed. Changed in such away that we will no longer have the freedoms that we brag about today and seem to think are some sort of inalienable right.

So here’s my one and only prediction for 2010:

This will be the year in which we will see the biggest assault on copyright laws around the world. The end result of the secret war against copyright laws and the consumer will be one of the total annihilation of our copyright laws as we know them.

Sure we have all read posts about how the entertainment industry is trying to get changes made to existing copyright laws in various countries and the response has for the most part been a big *YAWN* and then it’s on to whining and gushing respectively over Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that the movement to gut existing copyright laws, being led by the US entertainment industry, is only a shadow of the real effort that will supersede any local country laws.

This is all being done behind closed doors where even government officials are being required to sign NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreements). Yes, NDAs on the creation of a new global treaty – something that has never been done before because laws and treaties are suppose to be open to public examination and input. This isn’t the case with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) however.

Don’t let the “Anti-Counterfeiting” part fool you either because in reality very little of this global trade agreement has anything to do with fighting piracy and has everything to do with dismantling individual country copyright laws and replacing it with a Universal Trade Agreement. The reason for this backdoor approach is because any and all local country laws would basically have no standing in disputes as they would be governed by the UN/WIPO backed ACTA treaty.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on ACTA (emphasis is mine):

In October 2007 the United States, the European Community, Switzerland and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Canada have joined the negotiations. Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines), what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with new tools targetting “Internet distribution and information technology”.

Professor Michael Geist, Canadian Professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has been one of the lone voice foretelling of the dangers to come with ACTA. You can read all his posts on ACTA here, but here are a few snippets:

Given the recent backlash at WIPO, the U.S. is avoiding the U.N. system.  Instead, it has created a new counterfeiting coalition of the willing that includes the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, and Canada.  Those countries yesterday simultaneously announced enthusiastic support for a new trade agreement with negotiations to begin next year.  Indeed, International Trade Minister David Emerson’s announcement to the House of Commons brought the MPs to their feet.

This treaty could ultimately prove bigger than WIPO – without the constraints of consensus building, developing countries, and civil society groups, the ACTA could further reshape the IP landscape with tougher enforcement, stronger penalties, and a gradual eradication of the copyright and trademark balance.

- Is ACTA the New WIPO

Rather than negotiating in an international venue such as the United Nations and opening the door to any interested countries, ACTA partners consisted of a small group of countries (Canada, United States, European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Morocco, and Singapore) meeting in secret and opposed broadening the process. The substance of the treaty was also accorded the highest level of secrecy.  Draft documents were not released to the public and even the locations of negotiations were often kept under wraps.  In fact, the U.S. government refused to disclose information about the treaty on national security grounds.

- ACTA Threatens Made-in-Canada Copyright Policy

While the substance of the treaty will remain fodder for much debate, Canadian officials recently hosted a public consultation during which they acknowledged the true motivation behind the ACTA. Senior officials stated that there were really two reasons for the treaty. The first, unsurprisingly, was concerns over counterfeiting. The second was the perceived stalemate at WIPO, where the growing emphasis on the Development Agenda and the heightened participation of developing countries and non-governmental organisations have stymied attempts by countries such as the United States to bull their way toward new treaties with little resistance.

- The ACTA Threat To The Future Of WIPO – Intellectual Property Watch :: Michael Geist

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the assault against copyright laws. It is an attack that is taking place around the world: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the US just to name a few. It is an attack that is taking place behind closed doors under a shroud of secrecy that is being enforced through never before seen NDAs at all levels.

It is planned that all these secret negotiations taking place will finish in 2010 and the world will be presented with a new world wide copyright/IP treaty that has been written and bullied through all levels of individual country governments by the US entertainment industry and their trade groups around the world.

If we think the copyright systems we have in each of our country is draconian I can promise you this – you ain’t seen nothing and if you don’t think this fight over copyright laws isn’t important then you sincerely need to give your head a shake. Under the provisions, that we know of from leaks, of ACTA we will see a sudden shift of power on the Internet. It will no longer be a medium of the people but instead it will be the new money machine of the entertainment industry and any voices against them will suddenly find themselves silenced and bereft of any legal recourse.

It won’t be our Internet anymore. So think about that as you all get woodies about how important Twitter is. Think about it as you bicker over whether RSS is dead, whether blogging is dead, or whether real-time search is the next killer app.

I would like to think that people are smart enough to see the coming danger – especially those of us in the tech industry – and do something to stem this tide. Sadly though we’re too worried about some new shiny toy. Too worried that we don’t have enough followers. Too worried about whether we are among the first to be using some stupid ass service.

The really sad part about this?

I don’t see it changing.

My only prediction for 2010 and it ain’t pretty is a post from: The Inquisitr

We are coming up to a watershed moment in the existence of the Internet and very few people seem to care. Right now there are two separate events happening that will have a direct impact on both the Internet we have right now and the one we will have in the future.

While they might seem like two disparate events they are in fact being lead by one industry. Under the guise of copyright infringement and piracy the entertainment as a whole is spearheading the adoption of the Digital Economy Bill in England and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which would be global in impact.

It is easy to shrug our collective shoulders over the Digital Economy Bill suggesting that it’s strictly a British problem and doesn’t affect the rest of at all. Well one only has to look at the persuasive use of CCTV in Britain and how it became the template for other countries like the U.S. to follow suite to see how foolish that argument is.

When I first wrote about the Digital Economy Bill here back in August of 2009 it was in light of how the original bill was changed after a weekend meeting get-together on the Greek island of Corfu. This little confab consisted of Lord Mandelson, the British business secretary, members of the Rothschild banking dynasty; who paid for the retreat, and David Geffen, an American billionaire record producer.

Prior to this retreat in sunny Corfu the Digital Economy Bill was actually a forward looking document that the British government hoped would take the country into the next millennium. After the trip though it suddenly became a totally different beast all together that saw everyone using the Internet as a criminal.

Now just this past week thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing we find out that this new Digital Economy Bill that is now before the British Parliament not only will treat web users as criminals but it is also being used to create a process that will see unelected officials able to do just about anything without Parliamentary oversight or control as long as it is done in the name of protecting copyright.

Doctorow was able to get his hands on some reliable information (via a British Labour Government source) and points to the three specific arguments that Lord Mandelson uses for justifying the revamped bill

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a “three-strikes” plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to “confer rights” for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to “impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement” (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright “militias” can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

As Doctorow points out in this post, and a follow-up to it, unelected officials like Lord Mandelson would have the power to create and run a private copyright police force that wouldn’t answer to anyone.

But that’s just for starters. The real meat is in the story we broke yesterday: Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he’s planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson’s successor in the next government would also have this power.

Now it would be a common reaction from the rest of us in the world to shrug our shoulders saying ah it’s a British problem, if they want to let this happen it’s their own fault and carry on our way. The problem is that besides recent history showing that this is a short-sighted position to take there is also another much more subtle and potentially dangerous change to individual country laws.

Under the guise of protecting corporate copyrights a new global treaty; think WTO, WIPO, WHO etc., called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is being created and agreed to in secret. The secrecy around ACTA is so persuasive that anyone viewing the actual agreement and participating in the talks around it are forced to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has even had to go to court to force the release of any documents surrounding the Treaty.

This is a treaty that has been written by the entertainment industry and then promoted to governments around the world and being the necessary way to protect the status quo in a world that is changing to fast for many people – especially in the corporate world. Both here in Canada and in the U.S. this treaty will fundamentally change the way that copyright laws are written and policed – just as we are seeing in England with their Digital Economy Bill.

In an article published in the Yale Journal of International Law (PDF version) Eddan Katz and Gwen Hinze wrote

In brief, the ACTA process has been deliberately more secretive than customary practices in international decision-making bodies to evade the debates about intellectual property (IP) at established multilateral institutions. The Office of the USTR has chosen to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement. Because of a loophole in democratic accountability on sole executive agreements, the Office of the USTR can sign off on an IP Enforcement agenda without any formal congressional involvement at all.

via Cory Doctorow

In Canada Professor Michael Geist; Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has been heavily involved in trying to keep this treaty in the public eye. You can read his work in this area here at his blog but he points to the spin that the organizations and governments involved in foisting this treaty on the world are putting around the secrecy.

In their opinion this secrecy is just normal business when working on large treaties like this but the facts; and history, tell a different story.

In the face of widespread criticism of the lack of ACTA transparency, participating governments and music industry lobbyists have claimed that the transparency issue is much ado about nothing.  As governments seek to keep relevant information secret, those same governments released a joint statement last week arguing that “it is accepted practice during trade negotiations among sovereign states to not share negotiating texts with the public at large, particularly at earlier stages of the negotiation.”

It is important to emphatically state that this is simply not the case for many multilateral agreements and the activities of international organizations that typically serve as the forum for global agreement discussions.  U.S. NGO groups have made a strong case for how ACTA’s lack of transparency is out-of-step with many other global norm setting exercises.

Michael Masnick at Techdirt also has a good post where he examines this argument that secrecy is normal and that any open discussion about ACTA is nothing more than a distraction.

A third point raised is that this isn’t a “treaty” but a “sole executive agreement,” so we shouldn’t worry since it can’t change the law. Except, by categorizing it as such, it’s actually a loophole that could potentially take Congress out of the process of reviewing or approving anything that’s in the agreement, and then just wait for the “but we must live up to our international obligations” to start pouring out of lobbyists and industry lawyers’ mouths.

This isn’t a treat about securing copyrights for rights holders as much as it is a method by which the entertainment industry of the U.S. can exert a stranglehold on the Internet. James Love at Knowledge Ecology International has a list of who the White House shared the ACTA text with; under an NDA, but what is more interesting is seeing just who some of the corporations behind this push for the acceptance of ACTA are.

In this regard Michael Masnick has a list of entertainment companies that signed a letter that was sent to the government supporting ACTA; which considering that they helped draft the treaty shouldn’t be too surprising.

Advertising Photographers of America
American Association of Independent Music (A2IM)
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. (ASMP)
Association of American Publishers (AAP)
Broadcast Music, Inc (BMI)
Commercial Photographers International
Directors Guild of America (DGA)
Evidence Photographers International Council
Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA)
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA)
National Music Publishers Association (NMPA)
NBC Universal
News Corporation
Picture Archive Council of America (PACA)
Professional Photographers of America (PPA)
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Reed Elsevier Inc.
Society of Sport & Event Photographers
Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA)
Stock Artists Alliance
Student Photographic Society
The Advertising Photographers of America
The Walt Disney Company
Time Warner, Inc.
Universal Music Group
Viacom Inc.
Warner Music Group

In combination these two seemingly disparate items might seem to be connected but the fact is that behind both of them are the powerful people in the entertainment industry that don’t want to boat rocked. In fact they are doing everything they can to get the boat back into dry dock and under lock and key.

We might like to believe that the Internet will always be open and free but the reality is that there are some strong forces at work that want to turn it into something totally different. It is my fear that with the secrecy surrounding things like ACTA and the Digital Economy Bill along with people’s seeming nonchalant attitudes we will end up with something totally different than we dream of.

That would be a sad day.

The usual suspects are threatening to dismantle our Internet is a post from: The Inquisitr

A discussion draft of a secret ACTA International copyright treaty has been leaked to Wikileaks.

The treaty, between the European Union, United States, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Japan was agreed upon in 2008, but despite requests across member nations, no Government so far has released any of the details.

The copy at Wikileaks is an early discussion draft, which parts missing and comments left by the various signatories, but what is there paints a disturbing picture of international co-operation on the issue of intellectual property.

The core of the document details how each party should deal with intellectual property matters, including costs, complaint process and legal standards. Where it goes further is with the introduction of set rate penalties based on types of infringement, and further makes no clear distinction (that I could see) between a commercial piracy outfit, and a kid at home downloading a movie on BitTorrent.

While international co-operation on issues such as these isn’t out of the ordinary, it’s the secrecy around the document that has caused alarm so far; and it turns out that it was justified. The net effect of this treaty is to overrule local laws and to increase the severity of intellectual property/ copyright laws in signatory nations. Maybe not police stat level, but in places like Australia and parts of the EU which don’t have as strict an interpretation of copyright (for example, you can legally rip a DVD in Australia), this document could force local laws to be changed.

You can read the full document via the links page on Wikileaks here.

Secret ACTA International Copyright Treaty leaked to Wikileaks is a post from: The Inquisitr