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At the start of 2012 I began a series of posts about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - ACTA. These took the form of updates on how ACTA was developing. I did this because I had a sense of how quickly things were moving, and how complicated the issues were, and I wanted to try to track those as they happened.
To make that easier, Computerworld UK brought those updates together on a single page. It turned out to be an extremely exciting ride as opposition to ACTA grew across Europe, culminating in the rejection by the European Parliament on 4 July last year.
However, one thing we have learned is that those behind unbalanced laws like SOPA and treaties like ACTA, never give up. If they fail with one, they just try again with another. And so it turns out in the wake of ACTA's demise. We are now witnessing exactly the same secretive approach being applied to TTIP - the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - originally known as TAFTA, the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement.
Although TTIP only began a few months ago, it is becoming increasingly controversial as more people begin to realise what is at stake. As I explain in several updates below, one of the key problems is the presence of "investor-state dispute settlement" - ISDS - which I predict will prove to be the most contentious part of TTIP.
Indeed, I think it is likely that ISDS will generate so much resistance among the European public that ultimately it will be removed from TTIP completely in order to give other parts more chance of being passed by the European Parliament, which must approve the agreement once it has been negotiated. What follows is my attempt to track the twists and turns of the journey to that final, fateful vote.
On Open Enterprise blog.
A theme that has re-appeared on this blog many times over the years is that of software patents. As I've noted before, they are perhaps the biggest single threat to free software, especially since the decline of Microsoft. Indeed, it's not hard to see software patent lawsuits being filed by Microsoft in the last, desperate stage of that decline in order to inflict the maximum damage on open source.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Back in October, we introduced the term "corporate sovereignty"
as an alternative to the standard but misleading phrase "investor-state
dispute settlement" (ISDS) that is generally used. We noted that
perhaps the worst manifestation of corporate sovereignty so far can be
seen in Ecuador, where one of the secret tribunals used in these cases
had ordered the Ecuadorean government to place Chevron above the
country's constitution.
On
Techdirt.
Last week we wrote about how Norway
had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in
Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the
country. Here, by contrast, is how not to do it, courtesy of publishers in the UK:
On
Techdirt.
One of the key insights driving open access is that if all the money
currently paid by libraries and other institutions for subscriptions to
academic journals was instead used to pay processing charges --
effectively, the cost of publishing -- all articles could be made freely
available online to everyone. Unfortunately, getting from one system to
the other has proved hard, since it requires many libraries to drop
subscriptions and pool their resources so that enough top-quality
journals can be published on an open-access basis. That's what makes this news from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, such a milestone:
On
Techdirt.
Back in January, Sony released the 'Bob Dylan Copyright Collection Volume'. As its name shamelessly
proclaims, that was purely to take advantage of an EU law to extend the
copyright term on recordings from 50 to 70 years there. Copyright is
supposed to offer an incentive to create new works, so extending
it after they are written is clearly nonsensical. Similarly, the idea
that musicians will suddenly be inspired to write more new songs because
of the extra 20 years of protection that only kicks in 50 years from when the song is recorded is just silly.
On
Techdirt.
Even though Creative Commons licenses have only been in existence for
just over a decade, it's now hard to imagine the online world without
them. The ability they offer to modify or even cancel copyright's
monopoly has led to all kinds of innovation, and given that success (as
well as one or two failures), you might think there's no need for any more CC licenses. Creative Commons begs to differ:
On
Techdirt.
As the US applies more and more pressure to the other nations taking
part in the secret TPP negotiations in an attempt to get them to accept
its demands, one issue that is starting to be raised is the central one
of benefits. Given the sacrifices the USTR is demanding from other
countries in order to strike a deal, people in affected countries are
rightly questioning what exactly they will get in return. The growing
doubts about the value of TPP are presumably why at this late stage the USTR has just released a document touting its "economic benefits". There are two things worth noting about this.
On
Techdirt.
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about two important cases before
Europe's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union
(ECJ). They both involved the European Union's Data Retention Directive,
which obliges telecoms companies to retain metadata about their
customers -- now an even more contentious issue in the wake of Edward
Snowden's leaks. One case was from Ireland, brought by Digital Rights
Ireland, which needs donations to carry on its great work, and the other from the Austrian digital rights group AKVorrat (which probably also needs support.)
On
Techdirt.
It's taken a while for Europeans to recover from the discovery that they
are being spied upon by the NSA (with some help from its friends at
GCHQ and elsewhere) pretty much everywhere online and all the time, but
finally the legal fightback is beginning to gather pace, at least in the
UK. Things got moving in October, with a case filed at the European Court of Human Rights:
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has noted many times, the patent system is broken, and in various ways. One major problem is the way it inhibits innovation, rather than promoting it, as its supporters usually claim. Here's why:
On
Techdirt.
We've had a few posts about plagiarism here on Techdirt, and how it differs
from copyright infringement. One important question that needs to be
considered is: what's the correct way to acknowledge and correct
plagiarism when it is discovered? Probably not like this, in a case pointed out to us by Ivan Oransky via Jonathan Eisen, and reported by Retraction Watch:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been writing about corporate sovereignty (also known as investor-state dispute settlement -- ISDS) for a year now. Back in April, we noted that it was likely to be part of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which were just about to start. Since then, more and more people have woken up to its dangers, and called for corporate sovereignty to be dropped from the negotiations.
On
Techdirt.
There's no shortage of critics of massive trade agreements like TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP, but today saw strong condemnation from a very unexpected
quarter: the Holy See, often, if erroneously, equated with the Vatican. Whatever the jurisdictional differences, the statement
delivered by His Excellency Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Apostolic
Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations and
Other International Organizations in Geneva at the 9th Session of the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization
presumably comes with the full approval of Pope Francis himself. We can
assume that because of the extremely controversial statements it
contains, which would have required approval at the highest level.
Things like this:
On
Techdirt.
Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter,
but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of
flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the
monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they
weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the
former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has
explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them. The first reason is practical:
On
Techdirt.
Insofar as we know what's in them, both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP appear to
have deep, thorough-going problems, which are unlikely to be addressed
by the current approach being used to draw them up. However, a justified
criticism of that view might be that anybody can carp, but what should
we put in their place? Rising to that challenge is an alliance of some
50 civil society groups, who over four years have put together what they
call The Alternative Trade Mandate (pdf), which is specifically designed to present a radically different emphasis for European trade negotiations:
On
Techdirt.
One of the key problems with TAFTA/TTIP is the same one that plagued ACTA and has recently been highlighted with TPP:
the complete lack of any meaningful transparency. However much the
negotiators may claim that transparency is important to them, there's no
evidence to support that view. Or perhaps the politicians think the
existence of conferences like one being held in Brussels next January
provide enough opportunities for anyone who wants to convey their views
to the EU's Chief Negotiator, say. He'll be attending, along with
several other senior European Commission officials, according to the
program.
On
Techdirt.
In their obsessive war on piracy, the copyright industries have tried
various approaches. For a while, the "three strikes and out" was
popular, until it became clear that it was completely ineffectual.
At the moment, the preferred method is to try to force ISPs to block
access to sites holding material that infringes on copyright. The UK led the way, and has now made the whole process pretty routine, as a recent post on the TechnoLlama blog explains:
On
Techdirt.
An increasing number of online services use location information. This
places suppliers like Google, with its Google Maps, in a strong
position, since creating such geodata for entire countries -- or the
world -- is something that can only be undertaken by large, well-funded
companies. At least, that was true in the past, but increasingly the
free, crowd-sourced alternative, OpenStreetMap, is gaining both contributors and commercial users:
On
Techdirt.
The problems with DRM for videos, music, ebooks and games are well
known. Despite those issues for the purchasers of digital goods,
companies love DRM because it gives them control over how their products
are used -- something that has been much harder to achieve in the
analog world. The risk is that as digital technologies begin to permeate
traditional physical products, they will bring with them new forms of DRM, as this post by Karsten Gerloff about Zoe, one of Renault's electric cars, makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
Despite the growing evidence
that corporate sovereignty clauses in international treaties pose
considerable risks to nations that sign them, such "investor-state
dispute settlement" (ISDS) mechanisms are present in both TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP -- at least as far as we know: it's hard to be sure given the
obsessive secrecy surrounding them.
On
Techdirt.
Back in June, Mike wrote about the important Myriad Genetics judgment
from the Supreme Court, which said that naturally-occuring genetic
material could not
be patented. However, because of some hedging from the judges, there
were concerns about how much this would block gene patents in practice.
Last week we had an indication that the impact is indeed likely to be significant, as VentureBeat reports:
On
Techdirt.
We noted last week that Japan was bringing in severe new punishments designed to discourage
whistleblowing. That might suggest that following Snowden's leaks,
there will now be a period of repression where potential whistleblowers
lie low to avoid bringing down the wrath of governments on their heads.
One person with a better idea than most about what is really going on
here is Jesselyn Radack. She's employed by the General Accountability
Project (GAP), a leading US whistleblower protection and advocacy
organization. Here's part of her biography on the GAP site:
On
Techdirt.
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