Man, it’s a hard time to be America. The economy is in ruins (despite claims of recovery), the legislature seems ungovernable, and nobody wants to really fix it because it would take too long. It makes everyone around you turn into sharks, waiting for you to cut yourself. Such is the case with new revelations come from the incredibly leaky ACTA negotiations. When the current draft of the trade agreement — spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the RIAA — was leaked to the public recently, it seemed to be both a massive concession (the three-strikes policy has been all but removed) and a massive expansion (rules resembling the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would be implemented on a global scale) of American copyright policy.
Yet, with leery eyes, nations have indeed exploited the small signs of weakness that the American delegation is falling back, according to new leaks in the negotiations. First, the American delegation seeks ACTA no longer as a treaty but as an “executive agreement.” This allows governments to ratify it without legislative approval, but it also means it CANNOT alter current national law. Both the Japanese and European delegations made note of that, with the Japanese stating it would have to “examine its own laws” before agreeing to any of this, and the Europeans stating that the draft is “not consistent” with EU law.
Further, the American delegation attempted to justify the rules as full implementation of the WIPO Treaty signed back in 1996. However, the vague wording of the treaty granted nations some flexibility in implementing the rules (for example, the use of DRM) agreed to. This was noted heavily by the Japanese delegation, who also questioned how much harm was was actually caused by passing DRM, as well as how useful protections against such bypasses are. (Hey! We know the answer to that one!)
Probably the most revelatory agreement made in negotiations, however, was that all nations agreed that the implementation of ISP monitoring for file-sharing, as well as mandatory enforcement of such a measure to protect ISPs from lawsuits, is off the table. Such harmful and costly monitoring significantly weakens the effectiveness of a three-strikes policy, even though that effectiveness is questionable at best to begin with.
Looks like we don’t have to call Ron Paul, after all.
