TTIP explained: The secretive US-EU treaty that undermines democracy

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), sometimes known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), is currently being negotiated behind closed doors by the European Union and the US. If it is successfully completed, it will be the biggest trade agreement in history. But TTIP is not just something of interest to export businesses: it will affect most areas of everyday life, including the online world.

Opponents fear it could undermine many of Europe's hard-won laws protecting online privacy, health, safety and the environment, even democracy itself. For example, it could effectively place US investors in the EU above the law by allowing companies to claim compensation from an EU country when it brings in a regulation that allegedly harms their investments—and for EU companies to attack US laws in the same way.

Those far-reaching effects flow from the fact that TTIP is not a traditional trade agreement, which generally seeks to lower tariffs between nations so as to increase trade between them. The tariffs between the US and EU are already very low—under 3%—so there is little scope to boost transatlantic trade significantly by removing the remaining tariffs completely.

Instead, TTIP aims to go beyond tariffs, and to remove what it calls "non-tariff barriers." These refer to the different ways of doing things which make it hard for a company to sell exactly the same product on both sides of the Atlantic. Typically, different national regulations require different kinds of tests and product information, which leads to a duplication of effort that adds costs and delays to making products available in the other market.

TTIP's stated aim to smooth away those NTBs is good news for the companies, but not so much for pesky humans. What are classed as "barriers" include things like regulations that protect the environment or the online privacy of Europeans. The threat to diminish or remove them in the name of transatlantic "harmonisation", has turned the traditionally rather dull area of trade agreements into the most important focus for civil action in years, galvanizing a broad spectrum of groups on both sides of the Atlantic that see TTIP not as a potential boon, but a bane.

Read the rest of this 6,376-word article on Ars Technica UK.

Making an Ars Technica of Itself

This review of "Burning the Ships" is perhaps the most clueless thing I've ever read on Ars Technica:

Phelps' point throughout is that such deals were possible thanks to Microsoft's IP, which gave it something valuable to offer in cross-licensing agreements that brought companies together as partners, not just as totally independent rivals. That's the way it has to be for companies today; technology has grown so complex that a "fortress mentality culture and go-it-alone market strategy" simply won't work anymore. Collaboration and partnership are the new name of the game, and IP is the glue that seals such deals.

That's like saying giving people manacles is providing them with some nice bling. The point is they are manacles - just like intellectual monopolies are manacles. They are only valuable in the eyes of slave traders; any civilised society would ban them.

To call this "collaboration" is a perversion of language: it's about *enslavement*, pure and simple. It's just that Microsoft has become subtler.

The Value of Sharing

Yesterday I wrote about how the media industries abuse language in order to justify their broken business models; today I'd like to complement this by looking at their misuse of numbers.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Copyright Emperor Has No Clothes

Tim Lee has a stonker of a post on Ars Technica drawing parallels between copyright today and property rights debates of the 18th and 19th centuries in the US. It's a hugely-enjoyable, thought-provoking piece.

He also offers some commentary on his own words:

Copyright maximalists love to draw parallels between property rights and copyrights. But if we take that analogy seriously, I think it actually leads in some places that they aren't going to like. Our property rights system was not created by Congressional (or state legislative) fiat. Property rights in land is an organic, bottom up exercize. The job of government isn't to dictate what the property system should look like, but to formalize and reinforce the property arrangements people naturally agree to among themselves.

The fact that our current copyright system is widely ignored and evaded is a sign, I think, that Congress has done a poor job of aligning the copyright system with ordinary individuals' sense of right and wrong. Just as squatters 200 years ago didn't think it was right that they be booted off land they cleared and brought under cultivation in favor of an absentee landowner who had written a check to a distant federal government, so a lot of people feel it's unfair to fine a woman hundreds of thousands of dollars to share a couple of CDs' worth of music. You might believe (as do I) that file sharing is unethical, just as many people believed that squatting was unethical. But at some point, Congress has no choice but to recognize the realities on the ground, just as it did with real property in the 19th century.

As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, the copyright debate is really hotting up as people start to question the outrageous claims and assumptions of the maximalists. The great thing is, it's becoming increasingly obvious that the copyright emperor has no clothes.

In Praise of Modularity (Again)

News that Firefox users tend to be more up-to-date with their security patches is interesting, especially for on account of the suggested explanation:

Much of this patching success has to be credited to Firefox's automatic update mechanism, which debuted in version 1.5 but was improved in version 2.0. The browser checks to see if a new version is available and notifies the user when it finds one. The security updates tend to be small (around 200KB to 700KB), which also makes the updating process less painful.

Internet Explorer, in contrast, is typically updated along with the rest of the system with Windows Update. Regular users of Windows Update automatically got upgraded from IE 6 to IE 7, so it is not surprising that people still stuck on IE 6 are not updating as much as IE 7. It's possible to assume that many of the people who aren't using Windows Update are avoiding it because the Windows Update web site checks (using WGA) to see if the user has a legitimate copy of the operating system, but as critical updates for IE 6 are still automatically downloaded by Windows even if WGA fails, it seems more likely that the numbers include legitimate users who have turned automatic updates off.

Once again, the virtues of modularity become clear - and turn out to have very clear real-world benefits too, in this case.

Eee by Gum: Now That's What I Call (e)Music

This Ars Technica article makes a good point: that Apple's refusal to license its DRM system means that only non-DRM'd music can be sold by anyone other than Apple to iPod users, now the largest slice of the digital music sector. And that's just what eMusic has done with great success: it claims to be the world's number retailer of downloadable music.

What particularly interested me is that among its million tracks are many from the Naxos catalogue. Naxos is the biggest-selling classical label, and by no means just cheap and cheerful, even if it started out that way. It now has an enviably-wide collection that includes many rare and obscure masterpieces, with more being added all the time.

No DRM, reasonable prices (25 US cents or under per track) and an increasingly good classical catalogue: bravo, eMusic.