EU Politicians Snub European Commission: Do Not See IP Protection As Key To Internal Security Strategy

from the ACTA-backfires dept

One of the most dishonest aspects of ACTA was its attempt to equate genuinely dangerous products like fake medicines with totally harmless ones like unauthorized digital copies. Fortunately, that's such an absurd equivalence that more and more people have voiced their concerns over it -- including the Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament, who cited it as one reason why they would be voting against ACTA:

ACTA wrongly bundles together too many different types of IPR enforcement under the same umbrella, treating physical goods and digital services in the same way. We believe they should be approached in separate sectoral agreements, and following a comprehensive and democratically debated mandate and impact assessment.

EDRI points out that the European Commission has just suffered a major defeat at the hands of the European Parliament thanks to this lazy kind of coupling in its proposed "Internal Security Strategy" (ISS) for Europe:

In a piece of what the Commission appears to have believed to be a piece of masterful political syllogism, it explained in its Internal Security Strategy (adopted at the end of 2010) that dangerous counterfeit goods are a threat for human health. These counterfeiting offences are infringements of intellectual property rights (IPR). "Piracy" is also an infringement of intellectual proprety rights. Consequently, the fight against "counterfeiting and piracy" must be included in the EU's Internal Security Strategy.

This is part of the wider strategy, as seen in ACTA, to treat all IPR as if it were the same, with dangerous medicines being considered as important as unauthorised downloading and vice versa. The obvious problem, as has become obvious in the ACTA, is that treating serious and trivial infringements as if they were of equal importance will inevitably result in either the serious infringement being treated as if it were trivial or vice versa.

But something that might have been simply waved through before ACTA has now been met with skepticism:

The European Parliament, however, far more sensitive now to the questionable approach of the European Commission to intellectual property rights as a result of the ACTA discussions, recognised this crude attempt to push its so far unsuccessful approach to an even higher level of hysteria. Whatever else one can say about downloading a song without authorisation, the number of deaths that it is likely to cause is, we believe, comparatively low.

As a result, and by a huge majority, the members of the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the ISS that includes the following major slap-down for the European Commission:

...it does not appear fully justified or appropriate to take action in the field of the enforcement of intellectual property rights – a matter which is part of a specific in-depth debate – within the framework of the ISS;

That is a noteworthy refusal, and suggests that ACTA's attempt to lump online sharing with counterfeit medicines, and to make them subject to the same severe civil and even criminal sanctions, has backfired badly. It might be too much to take this ISS snub as an indication of what will happen when the European Parliament votes on ACTA later this summer, but it certainly suggests a new-found wariness in this area.

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Filed Under: acta, edri, european commission, european union

Newly Revealed Negotiating Documents Show How US Companies Had Excessive Input On ACTA

from the eu-commission-failure dept

The folks at EDRI and Access were able to get their hands on four "meeting notes" from the European Commission ACTA negotiators, concerning what happened at various meetings. This is especially important as the EU gets closer to an actual vote on ACTA. There are a number of issues raised by these documents, and the folks at TorrentFreak have covered many of the issues from an EU perspective. However, one thing that struck me about the documents was how much input US companies got in the process, compared to stakeholders elsewhere. We already know that the USTR spends an inordinate amount of time listening to Hollywood and taking its word as gospel, but as these documents reveal, the EU and other negotiating partners were unable to balance that by sharing the documents with other stakeholders.

Specifically, the US repeatedly told negotiators that it was sharing ACTA documents with industry representatives using non-disclosure agreements -- while the EU negotiators repeatedly complained that there was no legal way for it to share the documents with anyone. In the end, the EU meekly appears to have given up on this point. What this means, of course, is that the US -- and its close connections with entertainment industry special interests -- were able to have significantly more say in matters concerning ACTA. While there was no guarantee that the EU would have briefed public interest stakeholders, there definitely appeared to be at least some concern that such folks were not heard from -- but no real effort to fight for such.

Also, while it's not a surprise that the US wrote "the internet chapter" of ACTA, it is rather enlightening to have it confirmed that it was also the US who pushed so strong for a three strikes disconnection policy (something that negotiators had, at one point, denied was being discussed -- only to be revealed they were lying when various texts were leaked). This, despite the fact that the US requires no such three strikes regime. So all the talk of how there was no intention to use ACTA to change US law? Yeah, that's a lie.

Separately, there's a discussion about how the US's initial text for the internet/digital section was so "confusing" that "several ACTA parties off-the-record said that they would wait for a EU text to "balance" the US one." This is not a surprise again. Entertainment industry lobbyists -- who, again, had full access to the texts and the ready ear of USTR negotiators (go ahead, connect the dots) -- know quite well how to write completely confounding legislation, where the real purposes are hidden in the complex and confusing language. That initial "confusing and complex" draft from the USTR wasn't because they don't know how to be clear. It's a way to hide little time bombs that the entertainment industry plans to explode at later dates -- just as they did with the ProIP bill, and the bizarrely ridiculous interpretation that the clause on seizing CD and DVD burners really meant seizing websites as well...

Filed Under: access, acta, auropean commission, edri, hollywood, transparency, ustr