On the Gripping Hand

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…)

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.

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.

ACTA stands for “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” and after a year of negotiations (following a year of “pre-negotiations”), that’s all we really know for certain. Which is just a bit insane for countries that are supposed to be representative democracies.

Trade agreements are often negotiated under cover of secrecy, so that industry lobbyists can’t focus on details that affect their constituents and derail the process. But, with ACTA, the industry lobbyists appear to be in on the game, privy to the details and offering advice to the negotiating teams. It’s only we poor, tax-paying, voting citizens that aren’t allowed to know anything.

The media isn’t helping. I don’t recall much media comment at all in New Zealand on ACTA, over the last year. A Google search outside official government sites says there are 5180 responses for ACTA, but the first 20 shows blogs (Br3nda Wallace, Colin Jackson, Geekzone and me), InternetNZ and the Distilled Spirits Association (both of whom put in submissions during last year’s “consultation” spurred by the Wikileaks release). The rest of the results are for other uses of the word “acta” (which is Latin for “beach” apparently, but also “register of events”), often for scientific journals. Searching on “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” is a little better, but largely the same type of suspects. The mainstream media is conspicuous by it’s absence. (more…)

Astute readers of the net will have noticed that Korea has a proposal for a three strikes or, should we say “graduated response” piece of legislation.

France is also going through the process of such legislation in spite of the fact that the European Parliament has declared it not suitable to Europe. In Ireland, the IP industry has coerced the largest ISP and has sent demands to the smaller ISPs to put in place a graduated response mechanism without legislation. That’s their preferred tactic, I think.

Germany has recently knocked back such a proposal, but there appears to be a surge in United States and other countries for such processes to be put in place.

This has led some people to ask “is this just about the RIAA or are they just a useful stalking horse for wider goals of censorship and control?”.

In my view, that’s bordering on tinfoil hat territory. I’m not disputing there is a wider game being played globally by interested parties, and to some extent it’s about control. But I really don’t think censorship’s the driving force. However, I agree that the RIAA et al are front and centre, while machinations occur behind closed doors. (more…)

Michael Geist reports that :

the next round of ACTA negotiations, which had been scheduled for next month in Morocco, has been delayed at the request of U.S. officials. While this does not signal a change in perspective on ACTA, the U.S. did want to provide incoming USTR officials time to review ACTA before continuing with the negotiations. No new meeting has been established.

As usual, nothing on the MED page about it, but who’s really surprised about that?

There’s a wee snippet in the Briefings to Incoming Ministers regarding ACTA. Yes, I do read these things. Not for fun, you understand, but they’re always a good way to get an overview of what government agencies are working on and how they are constructed, especially when there’s a change of Government. The Beehive site has gathered them all in one place so that you can access them. I downloaded the lot, because you never know when such things might vanish away… (more…)

We return you to your regular programme, after a summer hiatus that I wasn’t intending, actually. And what better way to get into 2009 than with some juicy leaked stuff!

James Love, of Knowledge Ecology International, has just blogged some details from apparently leaked documents re ACTA

http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/02/03/details-emerge-of-secret-acta/

It seems he has the outline and some text snippets, but doesn’t disclose the source. Love is pretty credible and I’d think unlikely to publish stuff he didn’t whole heartedly believe was correct, but he may be being spoofed – who knows?

There is apparently a permanent structure to be erected, the ACTA Oversight Council, to:
“supervise ACTA implementation, consider amendments, interpretations, and modifications to the agreement, and establish and delegate responsibilities to ad hoc working groups, (more…)