On the Gripping Hand

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spoke eloquently last week about freedom of information and what some countries needed to do about it. This cyber-sabre rattling was, however, in  contrast to Vice-President Joe Biden’s “piracy” summit at the White House last year. Biden’s view (as instructed by the “copyright industries” – and I can feel totally happy about using that term now, as even their key lobbyist refers to his clients that way) appears to be that information doesn’t want so much to be free as bought and sold.

There’s another interesting contrast: President Obama’s transparency memo – his first presidential act –  seems to have no impact on the United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk, who still insists that the ACTA negotiations are a matter of “national security”. It’s an interesting sidenote that almost all the other nations involved in ACTA swear they’ve all urged greater transparency in the negotiations, so one is left wondering which country is actually keeping it secret. Lookin’ at you, Barack! (more…)

Bless me Internet, for I have sinned. It is 6 whole months since my last post. Woh!

So what happened to drag me away from the keyboard?

• I got a dog (using the same rule as cats – see other blog)
• I helped run a BarCamp on Open Government
• I did a couple of other projects that I can’t link to or talk too much about
• I had bronchitis (been a pretty crappy winter all around, health-wise)
• I was accepted as an exhibitor in the Kapiti Arts Trail this weekend (#91)
• (I’m sure there was some other stuff)
• Oh yeah, I signed up on Twitter.

That last is the big one, really, as it chews up the most time. I have barely looked at RSS since April, and have only made one post to my family blog. It’s really quite fascinating to me (10K tweets later) and not a little frightening. I’m following most of the people I used to use RSS for, but now it’s in real time.

So, what’s hauled me back to the keyboard? ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – you may remember that I’ve blogged on this before. Well, it’s just entered its next round, in Korea, that well-known home of freedom and civil liberties (and the first country in the world to pass a 3 strikes law and implement it).

So, wassup with ACTA? For background, I’d like to point you to a recording of me discussing ACTA with Kim Hill on National Radio recently. Very pleased with the event and it’s now very timely, as ACTA has reared up again. (more…)

The BBC report that the Pirate Bay trial verdict is in and the Bay has lost. 1 year jail time and 30m Kroner (£2.4m) in damages.

The appeal should be interesting

(Tip o’the hat to Simon Grigg)

You may remember I mentioned the Copyright thread on Public Address System (PAS to its habitués). It got to 37 pages which we thought was quite a lot. There’s another one, starting from a review of Lawrence Lessig’s lecture in Auckland last year by Matthew Poole, which is now at 81 pages and 1600+ postings, and it’s gone into the issues for the music industry at some length (warning: abandon hope all ye who enter here, as much of it goes round in circles – just pick through and find the nuggets)

Yesterday, Rob Stowell posted a link to a series of posts on Hypebot about free music, from inside the industry. I recommend reading them for some insight and to form your own opinion before reading on, because I’m about to dissect them.

(more…)

BREAKING NEWS: Michael has reported a new Wikileaks document which purports to be an ACTA draft. It’s a 5.2MB download and appears to be photographs of a document dated 7 July 2008.

It’s highly resistant to OCR but Wikileaks is hosting a page where transcriptions are being lodged

I think it’s awfully interesting to note that all requests for information around the world have been met with “There isn’t a draft text yet, so we can’t release anything. As soon as we have something, we’ll show you.”

Yeah, right

Someone emailed me and asked why I haven’t blogged anything about the ACTA “release of documents” last week. Basically, because it held no revelation, was not a release of information other than the spin agreed by the countries involved and because I’m currently working on something a lot closer to home, which I’ll post about later in the week.

(more…)

Michael Geist, Canadian law professor and copyright activist, has published an ACTA timeline from a Canadian perspective. He kindly notes my post with regard to the pre-negotiation history, and goes into a fair bit of detail from October 2007 onward, and finishing with “To be continued…”. Michael organised the Facebook protest against C-61 – the Canadian DMCA last year, so his government knows he’s not to be ignored.

His column is published in the Toronto Star and the Ottowa Citizen, but that seems to be as close as the MSM is getting to ACTA. With the Russia Today video I wrote about the other day, even knee-jerk Rethuglicans are asking “Why isn’t the Mainstream Media all over this?”

It’s a really fair question, and one I’ve referred to before, but I’ve yet to see a coherent answer.

So I thought I’d ask:

letters@dompost.co.nz

Dear sir

The Government is negotiating an important intellectual property treaty, the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and has been for 12 months, as reported on the Ministry of Economic Development’s page at http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/ContentTopicSummary____34357.aspx. Yet I see no reporting of this in your newspaper, or any of the NZ Fairfax stable. Newspapers in Australia and Canada have been reporting on this but our media have been silent.

May one ask why?

Regards

Mark Harris
Waikanae

I hold no huge hope of useful response, but you have to ask.

UPDATE: my name was included in the “points notes” sidebar.

(Hat-tip to harrismint for this one)

On Torrentfreak there is a report of an EU vote (481 in favour, 25 against and 21 abstentions) to accept a report about fundamental freedoms on the Internet.

For the third time in a year the European Parliament has spoken out against tougher anti-piracy legislation that would allow alleged file-sharers to be disconnected from the Internet based on evidence from anti-piracy lobby groups. Instead, they chose to protect rights and freedoms of Internet users.

Apparently, the French are not amused. (more…)

There is a video going around on the Intarwebz. I am not going to link directly to it but you can find it in the blog I link to in this post. It’s a report from Russia Today about ACTA. It has a clip of Richard Stallman sounding off, and a few others, and intimates that their laptops and MP3 players might be searched at the border if this “Act” goes through. I’ve seen this turn up on a couple of New Zealander boards, but the main places I am seeing it is on conservative American blogs.

The wing nuts are raging that Obama is interfering in their lives! Let me quote to you from one of the slightly less foaming:

Yikes! Is there any part of American citizens’ lives that the Obama administration does not want to intrude on? Where is the MSM on this? Can you imagine the outcry if this was coming down the pike under Bush? There would have been weeping and gnashing of teeth! And cries of totalitarianism, which it seems, is coming for us under the cover of night…

The irony that this originated under George Bush seems to escape them.

But they’re right to ask where are the mainstream media? Why haven’t they been all over this for the last 18 months? As I said in a previous post some have, but nowhere near enough.

The irony also is that the wing nuts are getting their information from a Russian blog (and funded by the State, no less). And yet they’re posting with labels like “liberal bias”, “media bias”, and “totalitarianism”. Way to have a rational discussion, guys.

ACTA is hairy and scary, not least because of the secrecy. But Europe is calling for more transparency, as is Canada, and Obama’s White House is reviewing the USTR’s stance of “national security” as I type (well, maybe not as I type as it’s just coming up Sunday morning in Washington DC). What will it take to shift the MED? Probably dynamite.

As bad as s92A was, ACTA is a whole other ball of wax. The media need to be on top of it, but they really are conspicuous by their absence. I don’t want to seem like a conspiracy theorist, but are the big media combines suppressing any reporting of the negotiations? Are there instructions going out to remote bureaus to not cover the issue?

Bloggers are able to get information. You’d think the MSM with their vast resources should be able to get at least that much, if not more. Because the alternative to the paranoia is that the media are just too stupid to recognize a story if it bit them on the arse.

One of the fraught issues, when looking at censorship, is child abuse images (CAI), also known as “child pornography” (note that I disdain the use of “kiddie porn” as it diminishes the importance of the issue). Anyone with children feels this one in the gut, that it could be their child being abused but for the grace of whatever deity they look to. I’ll own up front that I have no children, and thus little emotional stake in the debate, which is both a good and bad thing. Good, because I can look at the issue rationally and try to get to the bottom of it; bad, because many involved in the debate are so invested and regard those who are not with some suspicion. I can live with that.

Let me say, also, that I do not support the CAI ‘industry’, either the images or the rationalisations that many use to justify it. It does disgust me, but so does the life and death of JonBenet Ramsay and other matters of the exploitation of children for whatever reason. What I do support is rational policy based on hard data and not on unproven assumptions.

For the record, I was involved in 2005 in some research and testing for InternetNZ, Netsafe and the Department of Internal Affairs. We were looking at the Internet Watch Foundation’s filter list and assessing it for use in NZ. My conclusion then was that, although the list appeared to contain nothing that wasn’t related to CAI (I freely admit that I did not check every link!), it would not be a silver bullet in preventing NZ Internet users from seeing all CAI material. I was investigating the freedom of speech aspect as much as the efficacy of the filter. What I was looking for, particularly, was whether the list blocked material that would be legal in NZ (not really) and, more importantly, whether it allowed material that is illegal under NZ law (which it does). (more…)