[LINK] new copyright treaty secret
Jan Whitaker
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
Sun Mar 15 15:51:26 AEDT 2009
March 12, 2009 5:45 PM PDT
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html
Copyright treaty is classified for 'national security'
by <http://www.cnet.com/profile/declan00/>Declan McCullagh
Last September, the Bush administration
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10047945-38.html>defended the
unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated
by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could
criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.
Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of
government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a
discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and
related materials are "classified in the interest of national
security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."
The 1995 <http://www.fas.org/sgp/clinton/eo12958.html>Executive Order
12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do
"damage to the national security and the original classification
authority is able to identify or describe the damage."
Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group
<http://www.keionline.org/>Knowledge Ecology International, filed the
Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's
denial from the White House. The
<http://www.keionline.org/misc-docs/3/ustr_foia_denial.pdf>denial
letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by
<http://www.ustr.gov/Who_We_Are/Bios/Carmen_Suro-Bredie.html>Carmen
Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the
U.S. Trade Representative.
Love had written in his original request on January 31--submitted
soon after Obama's inauguration--that the documents "are being widely
circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S.
There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."
The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the
Bush administration, which
<http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/EFF_PK_v_USTR/foia-ustr-acta-response2-doc1_0.pdf>wrote
to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of
806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were "classified in the
interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."
In one of his first acts as president, Obama
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10147514-38.html>signed a memo
saying FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the
face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep
information confidential merely because public officials might be
embarrassed by disclosure."
Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say
that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial
scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement
that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."
A June 2008
<http://www.iccwbo.org/uploadedFiles/BASCAP/Pages/Business%20Paper%20-%20ACTA%20negotiators.pdf>memo
(PDF) from the International Chamber of Commerce, signed by
pro-copyright groups, says: "intellectual property theft is no less a
crime than physical property theft. An effective ACTA should
therefore establish clear and transparent standards for the
calculation and imposition of effective criminal penalties for IP
theft that...apply to both online and off-line IP transactions."
Similarly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called for "criminal
penalties for IP crimes, including online infringements."
Last fall, two senators--Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter
(R-Penn.)--known for their support of stringent intellectual property
laws, expressed concern that the ACTA could be too far-reaching.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer
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