RIAA: How Dare The Internet Use The DMCA That We Wrote To Build Useful Services!

from the calm-down,-sparky dept

As we've mentioned, today is the day that comments are due to the Copyright Office on the effectiveness (or not) of Section 512 of the DMCA, better known as the "notice and takedown" safe harbor provisions. We'll be posting the details of our own filing at some point (possibly not until Monday as we're still finalizing a few things), but some of the other filings are starting to filter out, including a fairly astounding 97-page document from a bunch of legacy music industry organizations (about half of which is the actual filing, with the rest being appendices), including the RIAA, ASCAP, AFM, NMPA, SoundExchange and more. It's basically every organization that represents the way the industry used to work -- and the document reads like an angry polemic against the internet. It would have been much shorter, if they just wrote "our business used to be much better when we had more control and less competition -- and we never bothered to adapt, so fuck Google and all those internet companies -- and let's change the DMCA to punish them and magically bring back the good old days."

Also, the filing seems to leave out the fairly important point that it was these groups that basically wrote the DMCA that they're now whining about. Actually, let's get even more specific. The comment here was co-written by lawyer Steve Metalitz -- who has a way of showing up whenever some legacy industry is pushing to make copyright laws much, much worse. Metalitz's own bio emphasizes the fact that, as a lobbyist, he was "instrumental in the drafting" of the DMCA: So it seems rather... rich, for the legacy music industry to hire Metalitz, who proudly states that he was "instrumental in the drafting" of the DMCA while lobbying on behalf of these same groups, to now write a jeremiad about how totally awful the DMCA is for these same groups. But that's what's happened. The document literally mentions Google or YouTube more than once per page. But it starts right in with the industry's concerns, which might be summarized as "why hasn't Google stopped the evil piracy!?!?"

The Music Community’s list of frustrations with the DMCA is long. A broken “notice-and-takedown” system. Toothless repeat infringer policies. Active services mischaracterized as passive intermediaries. Incentives for services to embrace willful blindness instead of preventing known and widespread infringement. The words “representative list” read out of the statute.

Basically, Metalitz uses the document as a chance to list off how he's sad that the courts have basically ruled against copyright holders trying to chip away at the safe harbors at pretty much every turn:

Courts have also given little meaning to key provisions for content owners in the DMCA bargain. Examples include “red flag” knowledge, repeat infringer policies and representative lists. The result: safe harbor status for services that choose to stick their heads in the sand rather than do their fair share, forcing content owners to divert valuable resources from away creating content to sending minimally effective take down notices, or for content owners with limited resources, to actually refrain from sending takedown notices at all. Content owners, especially those with limited resources, simply cannot take on the entire digital universe alone.

At its worst, the DMCA safe harbors have become a business plan for profiting off of stolen content; at best, the system is a de facto government subsidy enriching some digital services at the expense of creators. This almost 20 year-old, 20th Century law should be updated.

Astoundingly, this comment claims that the results in the YouTube and Veoh lawsuits prove how broken the DMCA is and how much it favors internet companies. Remember, Veoh was a YouTube competitor that won its lawsuit that had been filed by Universal Music... but went out of business due to the legal costs of defending itself under the DMCA. And Metalitz and the RIAA are bitching about the fact that Veoh won... as if that was the travesty in the case, rather than the fact that the recording industry was able to shut down a perfectly legal web service that many people found useful.

The comment goes on to whine that even as more music is available to the public these days, revenue is down for some of those who signed on to the comment (the comment is careful not to mention that ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and SoundExchange revenue keeps going up... but... those inconvenient details must be ignored). What the filing also ignores, of course, is that these very same players fought tooth and nail against any of the innovative services that helped make this revolution in music accessibility possible. They basically now want to tax all the innovative companies who experimented and found the models that work and make consumers better off, while they themselves did none of that and actively sought to block nearly every new innovation. Talk about entitlement.

The comment also ignores the basic fact that if so much more music is being consumed today, that seems to suggest that the law must be working in some manner, seeing as the purpose of copyright law is to incentivize the creation of new works so that the public can benefit. By their own words, that seems to be happening.

Despite music being more popular than ever today, U.S. music industry revenues have been virtually flat since 2010 and are down nearly 50% since the DMCA was enacted in 1998. This has led to what we call the “value grab”, creating market distortions that lead to bizarre statistics like vinyl records generating more revenue for the industry in 2015 than the billions of on-demand ad-supported music streams on YouTube and similar services.

Except, of course, that comparison between vinyl and YouTube is total bullshit. As we were just discussing a week ago, the industry is comparing apples and oranges, using the gross "retail value" on vinyl (ignoring discounts and all the money that goes to everyone in the distribution chain) and only counting the net "wholesale value" on free streams (and ignoring the upsell opportunities or other revenue that comes from ad-supported streams).

The summary so far: we wrote the DMCA, but now we're going to whine about it. The public is benefiting like never before from new music -- so we're going to ignore that the purpose of copyright law appears to be met. We're not making as much money as we used to (ignoring that some of us are making much more than we used to)... but we see big internet companies making lots of money, so we're going to ignore that it's probably because they innovated and built services the public wanted while we sued our own biggest fans.

Compelling!

And, of course, the comment pushes for a "notice and staydown" regime:

Copyright owners should not be required to engage in the endless game of sending repeat takedown notices to protect their works, simply because another or the same infringement of the initially noticed work appears at a marginally different URL than the first time. The current standard of “URL by URL” takedown does not make sense in a world where there is an infinite supply of URLs. As described in the response to Question 15, technologies exist to identify content that is reposted on a digital service after it is removed, services of all sizes have implemented them, and they should be deployed as a standard industry practice.

Again, this ignores the basic fact that copyright is context dependent. And you can't put a total block on content, because you don't actually know if the content is actually infringing each time. Hell, remember in the Viacom case against YouTube (which the comment whines about), Viacom had to admit that the evil pirate uploaders to a bunch of the videos... were actually Viacom employees trying to market Viacom content. This is why we don't do full on content blocks, because just because the content is up, doesn't mean that it's infringing.

Even more ridiculous, while at one point noting that almost no one files counternotices, so that means that DMCA takedowns are almost all legit (despite a recent study debunking this point), it later whines that there are too many false counternotices:

In our experience, the counter-notification process results in too many false-positive counter-notices. For example, IFPI received counter-notices on 653 infringements, based on a sample of 98,753 infringements noticed to YouTube. After reviewing these counter-notices, it appeared that over 80% of the counter-notices had no good faith basis for claiming “mistake or misidentification,” the only valid statutory grounds for a counter-notification. Yet, based on this sample, the association representing the rights holders would be required to institute over 500 lawsuits in order to enforce their rights. This is an unmanageable burden. These statistics further demonstrate that the deck is unfairly stacked against rights holders.

Filing 500 lawsuits would be an "unmanageable burden?" Funny, the RIAA was able to go after at least 30,000 individuals. And, really, this paragraph acts as if filing a lawsuit is the only possible remedy in such a situation. It's not.

Also, trying to make sure that they're as evil and against the public and fans as much as possible, the comment actually decides to whine about the ruling in the dancing baby case, saying that it's some horrible burden to have to consider fair use before sending a takedown, even though they just need a subjective good faith belief, rather than an objective one:

We take this opportunity to highlight one case in particular, Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. In that case, contrary to Congressional intent and the weight of authority concerning who has the burden of claiming and proving fair use, the court held that a copyright holder must subjectively consider fair use before submitting a DMCA notice. This unique decision, and the fanfare that has followed it, is quite remarkable considering that other courts have expressly rejected that view, and that the Supreme Court has routinely held that the burden of proof for a fair use defense rests on the accused infringer.

They also whine that the newly amended version of that ruling took out the random dicta that an automated takedown system could meet the standard.

Believe it or not, that's just a sampling of all the ridiculousness in the comment. It's simply not a reality-based document. One hopes that the Copyright Office might actually recognize that, though that seems unlikely.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca 512, liability, notice and staydown, notice and takedown, safe harbors, steve metalitz
Companies: ascap, nmpa, riaa, soundexchange

Copyright Lobbyists And The $1 Trillion Fallacy

from the even-if-we-take-the-bogus-stats-at-face-value dept

Well, here we go again. Earlier this week, the IIPA (a sort of uber copyright maximalist lobbying group, made up of other copyright maximalist lobbying groups, including the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, AAP, NMPA, ESA and IFTA) released a new report on the economic impact of "the Copyright Industries." This report comes out every few years, written by the copyright maximalists' favorite economist, Stephen Siwek, who is well known for both these reports and another set of reports in which he tries to calculate "losses" due to infringement using the most ridiculous and misleading methodology imaginable. This report is slightly different. There's not much in the way of direct methodology: he's basically lumping together a bunch of industries as "core copyright" industries, and presenting some stats around them. There are also the "partial copyright" industries, which are kind of laughable, since it includes things like "furniture."

The report is incredibly misleading (and is being used in a misleading way), but we'll get to that. Instead, let's start out by taking the report at face value, and assuming that it is accurate. The claim that the backers of the report (including NBCUniversal, which funded it) are latching onto is the big round number: the claim that:

for the first time, the contribution of the core copyright indus- tries of the U.S. economy surpassed one trillion dollars in 2012

One Trillion! Big number. So big that the IIPA was even able to get the head of the Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, to highlight it in her presentation that coincided with the launch of the report. She apparently put that number on a single powerpoint slide and asked people to remember that number.

As we'll describe, that number doesn't actually say what Pallante and others are pretending it says, but even if it did... doesn't it suggest that the industries are doing fine? Even as infringement has continued to be a major issue, and there are new ways to share content around the globe, the data in the report suggests that the "core copyright industries" have continued to grow and thrive at a very consistent pace -- completely contrasting the supposed doom and gloom these same folks tell us about how piracy is supposedly killing these industries.

Instead, the report shows a steady increase in revenue within these industries, a steady increase in employment and a steady increase in the salaries of those employed in those industries -- in which they make more than people in many other industries. Basically, every chart in the report suggests that the "core copyright industries" are thriving, especially compared to the wider economy. Take, for example, the compensation chart: And yet, during those same years, we were being told, repeatedly, that those industries were dying, that jobs were going away and that we needed much stricter new copyright laws. This chart seems to debunk all of that.

But... of course, that's not how the IIPA and its supporters are spinning this report. Instead, they're using it to argue that "the core copyright industries" are "so important" to the US economy that they need to new laws and protection:

"This study represents a milestone," said Steven J. Metalitz, counsel to the IIPA. "In order to preserve and enhance jobs, exports and economic contributions, it is critical that we have strong legal protections for U.S. creativity and innovation in the U.S. and abroad."

[....] "This report makes it crystal clear that workers in the creative industries make a huge contribution to America's economy," said Matt Loeb, international president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents crew members on movies and TV shows. "It also underscores the urgent need to do more to build, strengthen and protect employment in this dynamic part of our nation's economy."

But... neither of those claims follows from the numbers presented. If these people knew anything about basic economics, they'd know that protectionism doesn't help grow markets -- it constrains them. The way you "strengthen" employment in these markets is by allowing competition and innovation to flow, which is the exact opposite of the legal regime they're pushing for. Of course, everyone knows what this is really about. The report is supplied by a few legacy players in this space, the ones threatened by innovation and upstarts. It's being pushed by the gatekeepers who don't want to compete. They don't want there to be more competition and innovation, because that tends to allow artists and creators to go direct -- and not to have to rely on gatekeepers, who take an 85% cut of all revenue.

Even worse, the report is incredibly misleading -- in effect allowing Siwek, the IIPA, Maria Pallante and other copyright maximalists to blatantly use the success of others who did not rely at all on copyright to support their notions that we need more copyright. That's because of a basic fact that is totally ignored in the report: just because you produce "copyright" covered content, it does not mean that you needed copyright to do so, or that you require copyright laws to do so. Instead, the report and its supporters are falsely claiming that every bit of revenue from the "core copyright industries" is because of strict copyright law. That's provably false. Hell, technically, the revenue that this very site that you're reading now produces is almost certainly included in that "$1 trillion." We're very much a part of the "core copyright industries." And yet we don't rely on copyright. At all. In fact, we dedicate all of our content to the public domain.

And it goes beyond that. A significant portion of the revenue they're discussing actually comes from computer software: But that's an industry where there's tremendous support for changing copyright laws so that there's less protection and more sharing. The growth of the open source movement, and the fact that it powers so much of what we do today, is hardly an argument for stricter protectionism and ratcheting up copyright laws. But, by lumping them all in as "core copyright industries" and then pretending that means you need strict copyright laws to create that content, Siwek, his funders and their friends get to actually use the innovations and business models that show why stricter copyright may be a bad idea... to argue for stricter copyright law.

It's not just blatantly dishonest, it's co-opting the economic activity that disproves their argument to pretend it supports their argument. That Maria Pallante would quote that number and support it suggests serious problems in how the Copyright Office views things today. This kind of report has no business being taken seriously, let alone being used in any policy arguments at all. But, if it is, at the very least, people should point out that, if taken at face value, it pretty clearly shows that the copyright maximalists have been flat out lying about their industries struggling, and how they need things like SOPA, TPP and other legal changes.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright industry, copyright maximalism, core copyright, economic impact, fallacies, stephen siwek, steve metalitz
Companies: bsa, iipa, mpaa, nmpa, riaa

Congressional Staffer Says SOPA Protests 'Poisoned The Well', Failure To Pass Puts Internet At Risk

from the seriously? dept

Yikes. About a month ago, we wrote about some comments by Congressional staffer Stephanie Moore, the "Democrat's chief counsel on the House Judiciary Committee," in which she still couldn't come to grips with the fact that the public rose up against SOPA -- insisting that it must have been some nefarious "misinformation" campaign. We went through, in a fair amount of detail, how the misinformation was coming from her. It appears that Moore has decided to go even further down this path and express her general distaste for the public. During a panel discussion at the American Constitution Society's 2012 National Convention, covered by BNA, Moore was a panelist and apparently decided to totally mock the public and make the ridiculous claim that the failure to pass SOPA puts the internet at risk:

“Netizens poisoned the well, and as a result the reliability of the internet is at risk,” Moore said

Think about that for a second. That entire sentence is so incredibly insulting. Millions of people spoke out against bad legislation. The public spoke out, and Moore is so against the basic concept of democracy that she has to claim that millions of people expressing their political opinion is "poisoning the well." And how in the hell is "the reliability of the internet at risk" because Congress failed to pass a horrifically bad piece of legislation aimed at censoring sites one industry didn't like? Please.

The report goes on to a bunch of additional insulting comments from Moore towards the public, including the claim that "We don't know what the numbers mean," regarding the number of people who contacted Congress on January 18th. Here, I'll help you out: it means that a very large segment of the American population realized you were trying to push through a bad bill as a favor to some big Hollywood donors, and they didn't like it. What was so hard to understand about that?

On the same panel was lawyer Steve Metalitz, who represents a number of entertainment industry interests, and whom many people have suggested has had a major hand in the creation of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA and other such proposals. He also had some ridiculous things to say, including supporting the idea that DNS blocking was no problem. His reasoning? Lots of other countries censor the internet, why shouldn't the US? I'm not kidding:

“Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem,” Metalitz said during the ACS discussion. “If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken.”

Metalitz is wrong. Either his misinformed or he's lying. Even SOPA supporters admitted that there are only thirteen countries that enable DNS blocking. That's not "most." Oh, and the thirteen? China, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma (Myanmar), Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. This is not a list that we should want the US to be added to. And he's being disingenuous in saying that "the internet would already be broken." No one claimed that the internet as a whole would stop working if you put DNS blocking in place. But every single competent security technology expert pointed out that it would have significant negative impact on how important security systems would work. Hell, even Comcast (owner of NBC Universal -- the main corporate backer of SOPA) admitted that DNS blocking was incompatible with important DNS security technologies.

Who do we trust? A lawyer with zero computer security/networking knowledge, or pretty much every security expert around? Sorry, but I vote with the experts.

According to the report, Metalitz and Moore then teamed up to misrepresent the free speech concerns that people had about SOPA. They did so by insisting there were no such concerns and that the First Amendment and copyright law could not be in conflict:

Similarly, Metalitz said that the opposition's argument that “copyright means censorship is simply untrue.” He added, “I understand that in debates like this there is going to be over simplification, but this is a dangerous one for those that care about free expression.”

Moore agreed that the free speech concerns were misplaced. “The First Amendment argument is not appropriate in this context,” Moore said. “The First Amendment is part of copyright. They are not in tension.”

Thankfully, it sounds like there was strong pushback in the audience from folks like professor Lateef Mtima, but really, both Moore and Metalitz are once again being totally disingenuous. No one said that copyright itself means censorship. They said that overly broad copyright laws can and are used for censorship. This is not a hypothetical. We've already seen how Russia specifically used copyright law to stifle political speech from opponents. And right here in the US, we have the unfortunate story of the federal government censoring popular hip hop blogs for over a year by falsely accusing them of copyright infringement, shutting them down, and then denying them their day in court.

Frankly, both Moore and Metalitz owe those blog owners an apology. But, of course, no one involved in that situation has ever apologized. Much better to just flat out deny that copyright could ever be used for censorship. Here in the real world, that's called being in denial. You can't deny facts, but both Moore and Metalitz seem to have spent this entire panel doing exactly that.

Either way, given their roles in supporting SOPA and their refusal to understand the concerns against it, it seems likely that we haven't seen the last of horrible, dangerous legislation and international trade agreements from people like Moore and Metalitz.

Filed Under: acta, dns blocking, house judiciary committee, pipa, sopa, stephanie moore, steve metalitz

Reading Between The Still Secret Lines Of The ACTA Negotiations

from the the-politics-of-politics dept

There's been a lot of back and forth talk about ACTA and all the secrecy behind the negotiations on it. But what's really happening behind the scenes? Some experts are pointing out that it's a very profound shift in US policy -- but done in a way that most people wouldn't notice unless they've spent a lot of time understanding how DC politics works. Basically, the entertainment industry is driving through massive changes behind the scenes, and doing so in a way that lets them (falsely) say to the public "this really doesn't change anything."

Yesterday I attended a fascinating panel discussion about ACTA, hosted by Google at its Washington DC offices, as a lead-in to today's World Fair Use Day event. The four participants each brought a different perspective to the panel, though only one, Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents a coalition of entertainment industry interests, was there to defend ACTA. Jamie Love of KEI was his main sparring partner, though Jonathan Band (a lawyer representing various tech and library organizations) made plenty of insightful points as well. The final participant was a legislative staffer from Rep. Zoe Lofgren's office, Ryan Clough, who tiptoed the line of expressing some concern about ACTA, without fully coming out against it.

The National Journal's Tech Daily Dose has a short summary of the event, but there were a lot more interesting things going on in the discussions -- which got pretty heated at times. Metalitz began with the usual talking points from the entertainment industry on ACTA: (1) "copyright industries" represent a huge part of the economy and (2) piracy is a huge problem -- thus, ACTA is important. Love challenged Metalitz on the numbers (and Metalitz simply said he'd have to get back to Love on the specifics), and it was nice to see Clough counter Metalitz' numbers by pointing out that using the same counting methodology as the entertainment industry used to claim how "big" the copyright industry was, the size of industries that rely on exceptions to copyright law -- like fair use -- are even bigger. Love also countered Metalitz' one-sided claim of "economic harm" from infringing by pointing out that almost every "infringement" could be seen as an economic benefit in some area as well -- and discussed how research into medical cures -- that was almost certainly infringing -- was saving lives and how infringing on content for the purpose of teaching was making a smarter society.

But where the debate got really interesting, and dug in well beneath the talking points, was when Love and Band (with an occasional hand from Clough) read between the lines to explain how these things tend to work, and what's really going on, including the careful language choices by supporters of ACTA, such as Metalitz. They basically pulled back the curtains on the talking points and what happens in the backrooms during these types of negotiations. Amusingly, many on the panel had seen parts of some of the ACTA documents (briefly), but couldn't talk about them since they had signed an NDA. Band, in particular, kept noting that his comments were not based on the document he signed an NDA over, since he couldn't comment on that, but on a "leaked" copy that hit the internet. As Love and Band pointed out, the fact that they could only discuss the leaked content rather than what had actually been seen only served to highlight the ridiculousness of the process.

The key point, raised by both Love and Band, is that there are other forums for discussing international IP protections, such as TRIPS and WIPO -- both of which have become increasingly more transparent and open to holding discussions with many different parties (including consumer rights people). As an example, Love pointed out that at the most recent WIPO meetings about IP issues, folks from EFF and Public Knowledge participated along with the big copyright interests -- and he noted that as the discussion has become a more open and real conversation (rather than backroom dealing), the folks involved in WIPO and TRIPS are finally paying attention to the real impact of expansive copyright policy. Not only that, but the public has been able to speak up, and what's being said online and elsewhere by people concerned about these issues is being heard within these organizations. But, of course, the copyright folks don't like that.

On top of that, Band pointed out, within TRIPS and WIPO there are numerous developing countries who are recognizing -- correctly -- that strict IP enforcement is designed solely to benefit a small group of companies in developed nations at the expense of the people in developing nations. Thus, they're starting to push back on IP expansion. Combine all that, and you get ACTA -- an entirely new forum to take on these issues, which (conveniently) only includes developed nations and leaves out the developing nations who had become so pesky. Metalitz pulled out the "but this won't really change US law" gambit, to which Band pointed out that the real goal here was never to make huge changes to US law, but to eventually force all those developing nations to go along. Basically, you get the developed nations to agree to ACTA, written by the big copyright players, and then you start putting pressure on developing nations about how they need to conform to ACTA as well to join the club.

Even worse, the panelists explained multiple ways in which the claim that "this won't change US law" is bogus. First, if that were really true, there would be no reason to keep it secret. Love noted that the only reason to keep it secret is because the industry is "ashamed" of what's in the document, and won't come out and discuss it, knowing that the public would go nuts. Love also pointed out that in what's been leaked in ACTA, what you basically have is all the stuff from previous agreements (WIPO and TRIPS) that the copyright industry liked -- but without the consumer protections that were built into both agreements. And then, on top of that, the copyright industry put in dispute resolution concepts that greatly help it, not consumers. Effectively, it's a way to claim that nothing changes -- since it took the parts that favor the industry folks, but leaves out the protections and potentially aspects of the safe harbors.

Furthermore, Band and Love took on the fact that it's being called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, since almost none of that is true. It's got little to do with counterfeiting and little to do with trade. In fact, one of the "talking points" from the entertainment industry is that this is just an "executive agreement" rather than a "trade agreement" (which would require congressional approval). But why shove copyright into what's officially a "counterfeiting" agreement? Because "counterfeiting" is one of those words that no one wants to be in favor of. No politicians will speak out against a treaty supposedly designed to stop "counterfeiting" since people intuitively believe that counterfeiting is bad. As Love explained, it's like calling something "The Patriot Act." No politician wants to vote against something like that, no matter what the details are. He notes, tragically, that the only politicians who have spoken out against ACTA have spoken out about the transparency issue -- but not about the substance of what's being negotiated.

Furthermore, Band pointed out another neat trick used by the entertainment industry with ACTA. Because they can pretend it's not really an intellectual property agreement, but a "trade agreement," they can compare it to other trade agreements that were also negotiated in secrecy. But, as Band notes, this isn't really a trade agreement. There may be good reasons for certain aspects of trade agreements to be negotiated in secrecy, as it actually could involve national secrets. But a multilateral negotiation on IP policy is not a trade negotiation and involves no state secrets. The only other reason to call it that is to pretend that the level of "secrecy" is normal, despite it being a totally different type of negotiation.

Again, discussing the idea that ACTA wouldn't "change" laws very much, a lawyer in the audience pointed out how incorrect that statement was, and noted how none of the countries negotiating had clear laws on secondary copyright liability to the level required by the leaked ACTA documents -- and that even in the US secondary liability was far from settled law (and, in fact, aspects of it were disputed in various courts). But by mandating such secondary liability (things like an "inducement" standard for copyright infringement), it would mandate that countries go much further than they have already, sometimes in massive ways.

Metalitz, once again, didn't seem to think this is a problem -- misstating the meaning of the Grokster rulings (and the IsoHunt ruling) way beyond what the court intended -- and suggesting that other countries had a moral imperative to put in place similar laws. Not surprisingly, he singled out Canada -- despite Canada's strong copyright laws -- insisting that ACTA "might finally drag them into the 21st century." By putting in place more draconian 19th century monopoly rules designed to prop up one industry? No thanks.

All in all, it was an entertaining and enlightening talk. Mostly it was professional, though Metalitz regularly resorted to bizarre personal attacks and sarcastic digs at everyone else. He insisted that those who were complaining about secrecy "just don't want any agreement at all." He mocked Love for claiming that earlier treaties were more open by saying that the anti-circumvention clauses came out of "one of those super open treaties that Jamie likes so much," and most obnoxiously of all, when Love asked why the industry and the US government couldn't be more open on these things, Metalitz shot back that the US could absolutely be more open, "if it felt Jamie's concerns were more important than progressing on an agreement." This suggests that no agreement could be reached if the US government were honest about it. That statement alone should be pretty telling. There was also a really telling Freudian slip at one point by Metalitz, though he didn't realize it, and I don't think most people noticed. In trying to explain why ACTA negotiations made sense, he insisted that because ACTA would benefit some industries deeply, it made sense for countries to meet about it. Notice that he switched from talking about industry at the beginning of the sentence to countries at the end. To him, it's all the same. ACTA is really protectionism for a particular industry. The negotiations are effectively collusion, but perpetrated by gov't officials acting as proxies for industry.

I definitely learned a lot at the session, but came out of it more afraid of ACTA than when I went in. But I certainly have a much better understanding of how ridiculous and misleading the entertainment industry's talking points are on this discussion -- and hopefully you do too.

Update: If you have an hour and a half to spare, Google has now posted a video of the session:

Filed Under: acta, copyright, jamie love, jonathan band, politics, ryan clough, steve metalitz