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Big
Media Is Watching You
We’ve
been watching how the Obama administration has been handling
information and intellectual- property issues—these things
never break in neat, red state/blue state ways. Bill Clinton,
in fact, probably did more damage to rational IP policy than
any president ever. So far, there’s been little to report,
as Obama has had his hands full with other things. But there’s
a couple really troubling things going on.
First, the administration has been beefing up what it calls
“intellectual-property enforcement” by the appointment, late
last year, of the first-ever cabinet-level intellectual-property
“czar,” and just recently the creation of a Department of
Justice “task force” that’s supposed to address domestic and
international IP “theft.”
It’s unclear what any of this means, but there are plenty
of reasons to be worried. As a general matter, enforcement
of IP rights, like copyrights and patents, have always been
the responsibility of the IP owners. If you’ve been ripped
off, you go get a lawyer and go after the infringer. Only
in extreme cases, like with large counterfeiting operations,
has the government gotten involved and criminal sanctions
have been invoked. This could change.
The fact is that both the IP czar and the DoJ Task Force have
been created at the behest of Big Media, the handful of megacorporations
that control the mainstream music, film, television, and publishing
industries; the fact is that Big Media has been running around
blaming its problems, real or imagined, on how people use
the Internet; the fact is that Big Media has declared jihad
on all of us, boldly claiming it’s doing so on behalf of “creators”
when it’s really doing so on behalf of its shareholders, who
don’t create squat; the fact is that Big Media has commandeered
intellectual-property laws to be less about the public good
and more about protecting, to the public’s detriment, its
outdated imperial business models.
And now Big Media is in the White House and the Department
of Justice. Should we be concerned? Uh-huh. Big Media is watching
you.
Another related area of concern involves a series of secret
international trade negotiations that have been taking place
over the past year. These closed-door sessions are aimed at
creating something called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act
(ACTA), and involve representatives from much of the industrialized
world, but, notably, neither China nor Russia. ACTA appears
to be spearheaded by the U.S. trade representative, also acting
primarily at the behest of Big Media, and is thought to have
a goal of “toughening” international IP enforcement in order
to protect Big Media’s hegemony in the international content
market.
But we really don’t know, because the negotiations are secret.
Why? National security, dummy! Actually, national security
is just one of the ever-changing and bogus reasons given for
an incredible lack of transparency. And, given what we know
about what’s going on, the idea that this process is secret
is horrifying.
There have been leaks in the process, and they tend to confirm
the worst fears about ACTA: that it’s a massive power play
by Big Media designed to not only change other countries’
IP laws, but ours, too. The focus of ACTA appears to be “Internet
piracy,” and leaked documents show a movement toward holding
Internet service providers (like your cable or phone company)
responsible for whatever is being transmitted over their systems.
This would, in effect, force your ISP to spy on you, all for
the benefit of Big Media. There are signs that ACTA is also
looking at essentially suspending any notion of digital privacy
at national borders, too. Yikes.
The plan seems to be that our trade representative would negotiate
this Big Media wish list of draconian rules that would change
how the Internet works, our privacy, our ability to use information,
and our ability to create and communicate. Then the Obama
administration would send a bill to Congress implementing
all these ridiculous rules by changing copyright, trademark
and patent law, and probably big chunks of the federal criminal
statutes, too. The argument, pushed by Big Media lobbyists,
will be that the rest of the world is doing this stuff and
we can’t be left behind. And Congress, now more beholden to
corporate interests than ever (remember, corporations = people
= money = speech) rubberstamps the whole thing. And we’re
all royally screwed.
Sound like the tail wagging the dog? That’s exactly what it
is. Sound far-fetched? It’s not. This was exactly the game
plan Bill Clinton followed to get the Digital Millenium Copyright
Act, a similar but less far-reaching travesty of a law, passed
in 1998.
So you can’t say it can’t happen here, because it already
has.
—Paul
Rapp
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