Posted on 10/21/2003 1:18:53 PM PDT by HAL9000
International treaty will force 34 democracies to change copyright, IP laws
DVD backups forbidden, P2P file sharers to become felons
A REPORT from civil liberties organisation IP Justice claims today that a proposed treaty that will affect the 34 democracies in the Western world will mean wide-ranging changes to domestic laws including intellectual property rights.
The organisation said that a draft chapter in the FTTA treaty greatly expands criminal procedures and penalties against IP infringements in North America and the west.
A clause of the treaty will mean that non commercial infringers of peer to peer files will be sent to prison. The IP Justice report says that unless "the second clause to article 4.1 is deleted from the FTAA treaty, Internet music swapping will be a felony throughout the Western Hemisphere in 2005".
The treaty will also prevent people from bypassing technical restrictions on CDs and DVDs, in a way similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The draft treaty, says IP Justice, also has new conditions for fair use and personal use which, the organisation claims, will stop consumers from backing up their media collections.
The treaty will also make democracies change their copyright laws to force the term to extend to 70 years after an author dies. This extends the US copyright scheme to the 33 other democracies.
The US Constitution, says IP Justice, forbids companies to copyright facts and scientific data, but this will be overridden by the treaty.
Internet domain names will be decied by ICANN, which IP Justice describes as a "private and unaccountable organisation... ill equipped to determine the limits of freedom of expression rights or the scope of intellectual property rights".
According to Robin Gross, the organisation's executive director, "The FTAA Treaty's IP chapter reads like a 'wish list' for RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft lobbyists".
The treaty is due to go into effect by December 2005. The white paper on IP is here. µ
Your readiness to cast the "socialist" appellation and call for the leaving from FR of one who questions the wisdom of allowing corporations to write our laws indicates the former in your case. Please correct your conduct.
Interesting perspective on Adam Smith, founder of Capitalism, on Corporations.
And now with the lack of control that the owners have over management and the incestuous mixing of corporate leadership and board of directors we have a situation where once again, an elite runs the show. Sorry, I do not see the empirical evidence for that.
I object to the language as well. The "elite" here is not a bunch that inherited the money for parents but highly paid individuals that earn much on merit.
Our founders were unmistakeably classical liberals, they supported capitalism but despised unregulated corporations. Ownership of corporations was radically different then, as I mentioned earlier.
The concept of limited liability flies in the face of capitalism's mandated "absolute liability." What on earth does this mean?
That is how the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the copyright law in a unanimous decision - FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).
The decision stated -
The “sweat of the brow” doctrine had numerous flaws, the most glaring being that it extended copyright protection in a compilation beyond selection and arrangement -- the compiler's original contributions -- to the facts themselves. Under the doctrine, the only defense to infringement was independent creation. A subsequent compiler was “not entitled to take one word of information previously published,” but rather had to “independently work out the matter for himself, so as to arrive at the same result from the same common sources of information.” Id., at 88-89 (internal quotations omitted). “Sweat of the brow” courts thereby eschewed the most fundamental axiom of copyright law -- that no one may copyright facts or ideas. See Miller v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 650 F. 2d, at 1372 (criticizing “sweat of the brow” courts because “ensuring that later writers obtain the facts independently . . . is precisely the scope of protection given . . . copyrighted matter, and the law is clear that facts are not entitled to such protection”).
Here are the implications I want to know about, TopQuark -
Should the people of the United States surrender our rights to access and distribute FACTUAL DATA, utterly devoid of any creativity, to an international treaty?
The crap in this treaty sounds like something that will be strongly supported by DU, the globalists and the intellectual propery lawyers, but it will be a disaster for the rest of us.
Absolutely not! I am as worried about this one as you are.
In my previous post, however, I objected to someone's allegation that we are governed by corporations. That too would be suppported on DU.
Despite the fact that there are people of moderate means who benefit from them, corporations are still controlled by powerful special interests, who benefit greatly from these kinds of "modifications" to the rules of the game. As such, their influence on policy needs to be kept under close watch. Remember, they contribute just as much to the Rats as they do to the GOP.
I didn't say it's detrimental to anything. Perhaps I misunderstood what was being stated in the article, but this organization was saying that the Constitution actually prohibits the copyrighting of facts. The only logic that can be used to deduce that (so far as I can see) is that it doesn't specifically authorize the copyrighting of facts. By using the same logic, it's clear that it also doesn't authorize the copyrighting of paintings, and that its prefaratory clause refers to the "useful arts" - that is, technology (as in, patents, invention, etc.).
These "special interests" are agents of the retirees, widows and orhans that own our corporations today.
Firstly, it is not: minor shareholders exert influece collectively, via mutual funds.
Secondly, even if ownership were indeed of absentee variety, it by itself would not invalidate the point made in the previous post.
The owners are absent. The prevalence of cozy inner-circle deals among execs in public stock companies is one indicator , there are many. When the owner is absent, the most abusive renter drives out all the non-abusive renters. Any officer of a public stock company is a renter, in that way of looking at things. They shoudl be agents of the owners -- by law, yet the fiduciary duty required of such agents is just about lost as an enforced concept. So we have the execs as renters.
The statement above is non-sensical, sorry.
No, just the opposite: it's divestifying risk.
The honest accounting part of fiduciary duty is simply not what they are interested in.
Sure: you do not what's inside their heads.
Especially in (1) the froth of fiat money and And the song of the return on investment...
WHat the h-ll is that supposed to mean!?
(2) having an almost guareented income stream of retirment plans. The only thing that matters is avoiding panic, a stampede to cash and redemptions.
You complain about human nature and its bounded rationality. But you make a mistake of thinking that if people are boundedly rational then they are irrational.
The owners are absent. Not exactly: many are inactive.
What does it mean to be "present" in the case of GE?
inquire after the notion of agency.
The prevalence of cozy inner-circle deals among execs in public stock companies is one indicator , there are many. As evidenced by newspaper noise?
When the owner is absent, the most abusive renter drives out all the non-abusive renters. Absolutely nonsensical; sorry. <)P> Any officer of a public stock company is a renter, in that way of looking at things. No, he is a hired labor. As in the case of any other kind of labor, there is the agency problem; that is, divergence of interests between him and his employer.
They shoud be agents of the owners -- by law, yet the fiduciary duty required of such agents is just about lost as an enforced concept.
Most of the actions taken/foregone by the agents are unenforceable. In addition, the contracts are incomplete.
For these and other reasons, the employer typically relies on incentives rather than enforcement.
Do you (or anyone else) know of any case law that deals with that kind of abuse of copyright protection? Because that's something that's had me riled for a long time now. It's not just scientologists who take advantage of the law in this way. All manner of leftist groups do the same. You go to any one of their little shindigs and they have all this literature sprawled out over the table that they charge ridiculous prices for (while criticizing the capitalist system!). The obvious purpose is that they only want their supporters reading about the things they have in mind.
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