The current ACTA proposal chapter on what actions will be required of participating countries in order to defend intellectual property rights has been leaked, and it looks far from pretty. 3-strikes laws for most of the modern world, without due process clauses (why that would be legal is beyond me), 3rd party liability, expanded use of takedown notices.. Imagine something bad, and it will turn out to be worse.
See
here for Doctorow's article on boingboing
Quote:
Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA
I've read it through a few times and it reads a lot like DMCA-plus.
This also includes takedown procedures for trademark infringement, as well as the existing procedures against copyright infringement. Since trademark infringement is a lot harder for a service provider to adjudicate (and since things that might be trademark infringement take place every time you do something as innocuous as taking a photo of a street-scene that contains hundreds or thousands of trademarks), this sounds like a potential disaster to me.
Also buried in a footnote is a provision for forcing ISPs to terminate customers who've been accused -- but not convicted -- of copyright infringement (along with their families and anyone else who happens to share their net connection).
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See
here for Geist's analysis
Quote:
Three Strikes/Graduated Response
The draft chapter finally puts to rest the question of whether ACTA in its current form would establish a three strikes and you're out model. The USTR has recently emphatically stated that it does not establish a mandatory three strikes system. The draft reveals that this is correct, but the crucial word is mandatory. The draft U.S. chapter does require intermediaries to play a more aggressive role in policing their networks and the specific model cited is the three-strikes approach. In other words, the treaty may not specifically require three-strikes, but it clearly encourages it as the model to qualify as a safe harbour from liability. The specific provision, which is another pre-requisite for intermediary safe harbour from liability, states:
an online service provider adopting and reasonably implementing a policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright or related rights except that no Party may condition the limitations in subparagraph (a) on the online service provider's monitoring its services or affirmatively seeking facts indicating that infringing activity is occurring;
And what is an example of a policy provided in ACTA? The treaty states:
An example of such a policy is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider's system or network of repeat infringers.
This leaks shows how deceptive the USTR has been on this issue - on the one hand seeking to assure the public that there is no three-strikes and on the other specifically citing three strikes as its proposed policy model. Given the past U.S. history with anti-circumvention - which started with general language and now graduates to very specific requirements - there is little doubt that the same dynamic is at play with respect to three strikes.
From a process perspective, leaks coming out of the Mexico ACTA talks revealed that the ISP provisions were discussed, but the anti-circumvention provisions were not. This suggests that the anti-circumvention provisions from the U.S. are the only proposal currently on the table. According to a New Zealand official, there may be alternate proposals for the three-strikes model, all of which will presumably be discussed during the next round of negotiations in April in New Zealand.
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In the EU, the EuroParliament will eventually have to sign off on this, so perhaps finding out who your parliamentarians are, and pointing them towards
this book (
Amazon) may be of help, but basically all we can do is hope that enough people figure out in time that granting monopolies to companies only discourages innovation, because of a lack of competition.
But nobody seems to actually care about what does and does not stimulate creativity/innovation, preferring to stick his head in the sand and imagine that "protecting monopolies" will work.