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…)

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…)

[Warning - this one is quite long with lots of juicy links]

Mauricio Frietas has posted a Q&A session with Campbell Smith, the CEO of RIANZ that happened in one of the Forums. It’s an interesting read but Smith is still convinced that his cause is just and, hey, RIANZ are not the RIAA so just trust us already.

He cites a report by Entertainment Media Research in the UK (don’t go there if, like me, you use anything other than IE) which is the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey (direct link to full report PDF 8.6MB, Summary report PDF 848KB).
Actually, he says:

Independent research has found that the main driver of piracy is the
availability of music for free. For example, a recent survey in the UK
by Entertainment Media Research found that 7 in 10 file-sharers cited
the availability of free music as their reason for using peer-to-peer
networks and our focus group research in New Zealand suggests that it is
a similar driver here.

Okay, I’m up for some independent research. Let’s go looking for the report. (more…)

There’s been a lot talked about copyright recently what it is, what it isn’t, and I want to use this post to examine what I think it is.

A little potted history first. The idea of copyright arose initially in the 16th century with the advent of a new technology: the printing press. This was a revolutionary period in terms of content creation. What had previously been the province of the individual scholar hand-copying documents suddenly became a lot easier to do and a lot quicker. This is the essential difference that the printing press made. And, in England, the right to print these was governed by the Crown, and this was used to censor and suppress material that the Crown felt did not benefit it. (more…)

Well, sort of. Introduction of Section 92A has been delayed until 27 March, to allow the negotiating parties to sort the Code of Practice out.

3News has it here:

Government delays introduction of controversial ‘S92A’

The government has called for a delay in the implementation of Section 92A, the controversial Copyright Amendment Act due to come into force February 28.

John Key made the announcement at a post-cabinet press conference this afternoon, stating the implementation will be delayed until March 27.

“We are hoping that by that time we will have come up with a voluntary code of practice,” said Mr Key.

It is reported Section 92A will be suspended if no agreement is reached.

and Computer World has it here:

Finlayson John Key delays copyright law

[...] Computerworld spoke to technologist Nat Torkington who attended Finlayson’s press conference this afternoon at 4pm.

Torkington says the government may suspend the controversial S92a if no agreement is reached between the parties on how to implement it.

[...]Even if there is an agreement, Torkington says the government will monitor the first six months of the new regime and review the progress then.

My hearty thanks to everyone who has been involved in protests, and especially to Bronwyn Holloway-Smith and Matt Holloway of the Creative Freedom Foundation who, I have no doubt, are a big part of the cause of this. Well done guys!