"The White House" by ktylerconk on Flickr (CC-BY)

On January 31st, Jamie Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, filed a US Freedom of Information Act request to the White House for documents relating to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Last Thursday, the request was denied, citing national security reasons:

Love had written in his original request on January 31–submitted soon after Obama’s inauguration–that the documents “are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public.”

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure.”

Apparently, lobbyists have more of a right to know what their government is doing than their own people, even when  the treaty would have dramatic impacts domestically. Love will have to sue to get the documents, and by the time it makes it out of trial it may be too late.

So much for change we can believe in.

• CNet article

Border - Credit: tobin on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The Paris ACTA meeting has concluded, and Ars is reporting that the biggest news is that the treaty will most likely be delayed until March.

The big news was that future negotiations will include a March 2009 meeting in Morocco (one of the participating countries); barring some sort of bureaucratic miracle, we’ll have at least four months before the treaty could be ready.

In the meantime, new President Obama will have appointed a new US Trade Representative, the official who oversees the US side of the ACTA negotiations. This could affect the process, obviously, though Obama’s initial choice of LA Congressman Xavier Becerra (who has since declined the offer) suggests that Obama isn’t opposed to someone backing the interests of the movie and music industries. The two groups have real and important concerns about piracy and counterfeiting, but they have also pushed hard to stuff everything from ISP filtering to graduated response rules into ACTA.

I’m sorry, but I’m not really counting on Obamarama to make this all better.  I hope that is the case though.

• Ars Technica

Shh...it's a secret

On Monday, ACTA negotiators took questions at a public meeting.  No text has been revealed.

He made the case that the ACTA process was as open as it could be, and pointed out that the US has just taken a second round of public comments from any group that wants to submit them. There’s no draft text because, said McCoy, no such text yet exists; ACTA is still very much in the drawing-up stage, and progress is expected at an October meeting in Tokyo. With proposals still hazy, McCoy could get into few specifics, and he is bound by the confidentiality of the negotiating process from talking about what other countries have proposed so far.

As for what ACTA is not, McCoy stressed that it will not rewrite US law, it will not be about searching laptops and iPods at the border, and it isn’t simply an attempt to placate Big Content at the expense of everyone else. McCoy explicitly said that USTR wants to engage with Google and ISPs and others before making any final decisions on language, and he said that USTR is committed to a good agreement, not just a fast agreement.

Is this sufficient?

• Ars Technica

Ars Technica reports that 100 different groups have requested access to the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which, among other things, is rumored to contain significant changes to copyright and patent law.

Signatories of the letter include everyone from the EFF to the Australian National University to the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic to Korea’s Christian Media Network to the Dutch Consumentenbond to Thailand’s Drug Study Group (DSG) to the Ecologist Collective from Guadalajara, México to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. It’s a dizzying list with worldwide backing, but the more important question is whether it will have any effect.

It’s great that all of these organizations have banded together to voice their concern. Laws and agreements such as these need to be open to public scrutiny, not written behind closed doors.

• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

Apparently there’s an “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” in the works.  It’s a draft of a treaty that would let trade negotiations happen in private instead of in public at the UN.  The ACTA criminalizes (even legal) P2P and region-free DVD players.

The agreement covers the copying of information or ideas in a wide variety of contexts. For example page three, paragraph one is a “Pirate Bay killer” clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. This clause would also negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks.

The document reveals a proposal for a multi-lateral trade agreement of strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods hiding behind the issue of false trademarks. If adopted, a treaty of this form would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime, with new cooperation requirements upon internet service providers, including perfunctionary disclosure of customer information. The proposal also bans “anti-circumvention” measures which may affect online anonymity systems and would likely outlaw multi-region CD/DVD players.

Bob Goodlatte’s name is on this thing.  I’ve met him a few times (he even gave me his nomination to get into the Air Force Academy).  This is pretty lame.

• Wikileaks
• IP Justice
• Boing Boing