They never give up! ACTA... now CETA

The EU sounded like they had some sense about IP and the Internet when they passed on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Well, maybe they just knew a loser for PR when they saw one. Now comes Michael Geist, Professor of Law at Ottawa University to explain that the EU thinks they can slither around the dark edges and sneak a different trade agreement, the Canada-EU Trade Agreement(CETA). According to Prof. Geist, who provides in this blog post a handy section-by-section comparison, the two agreements are eerily similar. I hope EFF and its Canadian and European counterparts are paying attention! Ahoy out there!!

Anonymous attacks on Polish government websites after they sign ACTA treaty

Per Joanna Kulesza, through Giganet:

Hopefully a useful link to ones researching copyright and ACTA. In Poland
the battle is currently on:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/polish-government-websites-face-appar
ent-attack-by-internet-group-anonymous/2012/01/22/gIQAF1GEIQ_story.html

Hackers from Anonymous are attacking Polish governmental sites attempting to
force the government out of signing ACTA on Jan. 26th. You can follow the
attacks as they unfold: http://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousWiki

Regards,

Joanna (Kulesza)

ACTA stands for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Final text is available here (pdf). The first link here takes you to a U.S. government website that includes not only a link to the full text of the final version, but also previous versions as well. It also includes supporting statements from various recording industry, entertainment industry and the organizations that manage intellectual property for those industries. There are statements from the sponsor of SOPA and President Obama as well.

On October 1, 2011, the United States, Australia, Canada, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco, and Singapore signed the treaty in Tokyo. Representatives of the remaining ACTA negotiating parties, the European Union, Mexico, and Switzerland, attended the ceremony and confirmed their continuing strong support for and preparations to sign the Agreement as soon as practicable.

PC Magazine reports that Polish government leaders are meeting to reconsider their support for the ACTA Treaty.

Wikipedia's article on ACTA is very useful in pulling together links to criticism and the history of the treaty, including leaks about its negotiation. There are a number of organizations and groups that have strongly criticized the treaty's provisions. Follow the link to Wikipedia, or follow up this list of organizations:

* Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

* Consumers International (Press Release, May, 2011) (ACTA open letter, 2009)

* Free Software Foundation

* Free Knowledge Institute (European Union-based)

Wikipedia Black-out Day Against SOPA & PIPA

If you try to visit Wikipedia tomorrow (January 18, 2012), you will get a black-out. They are not alone: Boing Boing, Reddit, Google and others in a NetCoalition are joining in a protest against the two bills pending in Congress currently against online piracy: SOPA (HR 3261) and PIPA (S968). Check their home pages for various forms of protest.

The NetCoalition.com website (not the .org one!) has a lot of useful information on the bills if you need to do research on this area.

Here is a nice thumbnail of the opposition to SOPA and PIPA, though you can find a LOT more out there on the net. Briefly, there is concern that the provisions are vague, allow far more over-reaching by copyright holders than the current DMCA, so that they could do take down notices to web providers, but with lots more power behind it. For instance, SOPA provides that if a web host does not immediately blacklist an accused poster on their service, the web host would then have to fight along with the poster. According to Google, more than 50% of the take-down notices it has received under the DMCA have been by businesses out to drive out competitors, rather than really about copyright issues. This is liable to be just as true in the future. Copyright take down notices are being used as an anti-competitive tool to prevent existing web businesses from having to compete against new start-ups who want to provide either a new service or better service.

Here is a terrific, detailed review of the SOPA bill by a copyright lawyer, Mona Ibrahim, and an update reviewing the amendments.