Tell the US Trade Rep: don't let Hollywood set America's foreign relations agenda

Katy from Public Knowledge sez,

It's Special 301 season at the office of the US Trade Representatvie, which means that the content industry gets its annual opportunity to tell the USTR which countries should be put on the naughty list for not doing enough to protect American IP. The first round of comments are due next Friday, February 10th, and Public Knowledge has just launched a petition regarding the USTR's blind acceptance of big content's claims about foreign countries' IP laws.

This is part of how the US pressures foreign governments to adopt more stringent and draconian IP measures, like the Ley Sinde in Spain, with little regard for free speech and due process. As the recent SOPA/PIPA outrage has proven, this kind of overreach is not acceptable. Here's the blog post our international expert and staff attorney Rashmi Rangnath wrote, and here is the petition.

Tell The USTR Not to Do Big Content’s Bidding

• [Chappai]

  What big media (movies, music and TV) need to be doing is this… any foreign county that has not shut down illegal servers that are providing ill-gotten content no longer will be able to see movies in theaters as new releases, no longer will be able to purchase new music in stores and will not have access to the latest episodes of television series. What pocketbook will take the larger hit? The big media companies screaming about piracy or the big media companies screaming about their bottom line when they stop distribution of product in non-compliant countries?

  • [Florian Bösch]

    Well that suggestion has argumentative holes, for one they’ll (rightly so) claim that withdrawing from a country will just bolster piracy. Funny thing is, the same reasoning doesn’t seem to apply when they phase releases for countries according to zones, and when the least favorable zones have the highest piracy statistics, so maybe it’d be time to overthink the whole “release zone” thing and just put out content globally everywhere.

• [digi_owl]

  Either that Boingboing shop ad is context sensitive, or entropy got a weird sense of humor…

• [Ayzad .]

  Excuse me for asking a possibly stupid question, but I guess this is the right place to try…

  Can anybody kindly explain exactly why and how the interests of movie majors are so important as to justify such ingerence in international politics, technology, etc.? I have no doubts about the movie industry financial power… but it has to be just a fraction of other industries’ weight after all, isn’t it? In other words, if Hollywood can raise up such a fuss, it is scary to think what could happen when, say, the American food industry will fancy to militarily conquer and annex a country “because it would be useful to us to have larger crop fields”, or some other asinine private interest.

  Of course it is obvious that the real interests in this whole “antipiracy” ruse are political and about information (and thought) control, and the movie thing is just a nice excuse to try and silence the Net – yet I wonder why nobody ever questions the concept of one relatively small industry bullying the whole world. 

  • [Brett Kaplan]

    The food industry lobbies a lot too,  but they focus more on continuing programs of subsidies, I think. Also that whole “pizza is a vegetable” thing…