[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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