Anti-Counterfeiting Deal Aims For Global DMCA 380
An anonymous reader writes "Negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement continue on Wednesday as the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, and a handful of other countries secretly negotiate a copyright treaty that includes statutory damages, new search and seizure power, and anti-camcording rules. Now the substance of the Internet chapter has leaked, with information that the proposed chapter would create a 'Global DMCA' with anti-circumvention rules, liability for ISPs, and the possibility of three-strikes and you're out requirements."
Re:also have to be made law? (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia:
In the US, treaty ratification must be advised and consented to by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. While the United States House of Representatives does not vote on it at all, the requirement for Senate advice and consent to ratification makes it considerably more difficult in the US than in other democracies to rally enough political support for international treaties.
Of course, the President can sign a treaty, and follow it through government policies and executive order, without the treaty being ratified, but that gives it no inherent weight in law.
The treaty which ended World War I was hotly debated in the senate, and in fact we did not ratify the treaty as presented.
Re:Meh, Not the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
And, you know, this could alleviate a lot of the "bring iTunes/Amazon MP3/Hulu to the rest of the world" complaints we get so frequently on Slashdot. But all too often you see labels balk at foreign markets and a lot of time (though not always) they cite lack of copyright control and enforcement in these countries.
You are confused. The reason streaming services aren't globally available has nada to do with lax copyright controls and everything to with licensing rights. The system was created decades ago when information flow across borders was 100% physical and thus cumbersome. The copyright cartels exploited that fact by partitioning each country into its own licensing region and then created a market to buy and sell international distribution rights. In many cases there were no buyers for distribution rights in certain countries for reasons like the asking price being too high. The only people who felt inconvenienced by this arrangement were aficionados of foreign culture and ex-pats, everybody else didn't even know what they were missing.
The internet changed the awareness of the people so that today a hell of a lot more people are aware of what they are missing. The copyright cartels have not kept up with the increased demand, instead resting on the easy money of their monopolies, and the market for international distribution rights has not significantly changed. Stronger copyright controls won't enable increased foreign distribution, if anything it will just reinforce the status quo.
In contrast, piracy has actually provoked studios into more rapid foreign distribution - it is now common place for official DVDs of Hollywood productions to be released in countries like Russia, India and China day and date with theatrical release in the west - one recent example is District 9. [cnn.com]
Re:also have to be made law? (Score:3, Informative)
I think you've got the cart before the horse... An Ambassador has almost no decisionmaking authority. He/she represents his/her country in negotiations and serves as a proxy.
Ratification always goes through a country's law-making body. The Ambassador is given the document, which he then forwards to (in the case of the US) Congress, who ratifies or rejects the document like any other law, then gets the President to sign it (or not).
Of course, the negotiations to get to a version that every signatory can agree on can get far more complex, but the Ambassador cannot unilaterally accept or reject anything. They can negotiate, but they must go back to the Congress for approval. In some cases, Congress gives them parameters within which approval is pretty much guaranteed on a particular subject, but the Ambassador is only trying to get the "best deal" within the stated parameters.
The US, by the way, is not a part of the Kyoto Protocol, and we're not because the Protocol as agreed on by the signatories could not get through the US Congress at the time, and the rest of the signatories would not accept the changes that the US wanted.
Re:Americans (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, right! Like the rest of the world is voting out their corrupt politicians...
I'm telling you... blood is the only thing that will stop this. It's the only thing that matters more to the politicians than money. Blood. As in guillotines. I'm generally against violence. So I won't be the one shooting. But it's the only thing that can work now... Goldman Sachs execs and senators hanging from street lights.
Re:Americans (Score:3, Informative)
See what happens when you believe warm-fuzzy liberal propaganda!? They go and take your internet away!
Bush/McCain or Obama, it doesn't make a difference.
Either president could certainly have stopped this crap if he cared enough, these secret treaty negotiations started while Bush was running the show. [wikileaks.org]
Re:Meh, Not the problem. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:butchery (Score:3, Informative)
I agree that it's ridiculous, but there are alternatives. For example, consume and create Creative Commons-licensed media. Boycott media not provided on your terms, and you simply won't have this problem.
Re:Meh, Not the problem. (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. The region codes had nothing to do with piracy. That's just revisionist history. The region codes were put in because different regions of the world operate at different financial scales. This allows the media giants to set a lower price in countries where the median wage is much lower without worrying about cannibalizing profits in countries where the median wage is higher. The theory was that without region codes, DVDs sold in countries with a low wage level would get bought and reimported into the U.S. and sold at a significant profit, and they would still undercut the price of DVDs sold in the U.S. Because of the huge difference in those economic tiers, it would not be practical to eliminate this in any other way. Raising the cost in impoverished countries would kill sales there, and lowering the cost in the U.S. to levels where reimporting isn't feasible would kill profits here.
Instead, in practice, DVDs sold in countries with a low median wage get copied, stripped of their region codes, and sold in the U.S. The result is that the studios make even less profit than they would if region codes weren't around, but at least they can get criminal prosecution in some cases. In short, region codes were pretty much a failed attempt at curbing reimporting, and as a result, there are far fewer regions in Blu-Ray, and most Blu-Ray discs aren't region coded at all. If they thought it would curb piracy in any significant way, every Blu-Ray disc would have region codes. It's pretty clear that few, if any, industry leaders actually believe that.... :-)
Re:One way to solve this (Score:4, Informative)
Additionally, I use the RIAA Radar to find out whether groups are connected with the RIAA. I've bought some CDs online that are fine by the RIAA Radar.
http://www.riaaradar.com/
What I'm trying to say is, there *are* alternatives out there, people! If you seek them out, you will enjoy your new music as much, and you'll have more chance of meeting the artists too if they're not mega-famous
Re:Ratification. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, article six says that treaties become part of the "Supreme Law" regardless of whether they conflict or not, which is to say a treaty can supercede the Constitution simply because the article was badly written (or, after further research, apparently intentionally written that way to protect an existing peace treaty. Go figure).
That amendment in the 50s to fix that did not pass.