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EFF beats the Trans Pacific Partnership to Peru, sounds the alarm about upcoming brutal, secret copyright treaty meeting

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:00:44 +0000

Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,

The latest round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership starts today in Lima, Peru. Embedded in the trade agreement is an IP chapter that, according to leaks, exports the worst of US copyright law -- DRM blocks, extended copyright terms, ISPs as copyright cops -- without even of the judicial and constitutional counterbalances that US activists have fought so hard for.
In such a giant trade agreement, the Internet issues have sometime risked getting ignored by the mainstream press, and missed by the techies who'd be most affected.
But EFF's international rights director, Katitza Rodriguez, is Peruvian. She's spent the the last month working out of Lima's Escuelab hackerspace, talking to hackers, makers, journalists and artists about the dangers of IP chapter. The result has been petitions, memes, and videos, as well as meetings with politicians and articles in the Peruvian press.

We Beat Them to Lima: Opening a New Front Against Secret IP Treaties (Thanks, Danny!)

What's big, corrupt, terrifying and worse than ACTA? TPP. Here we go again!

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:02:54 +0000

Remember ACTA, the terrifying, secret SOPA-on-steroids copyright treaty that the US government tried to ram down the world's throat? Well, it's back, only this time it's called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it's limited (for now) to the Pacific Rim. The TPP negotiators are meeting (in secret, natch) in Peru to twirl their mustaches and cackle, and EFF has posted a great infographic summing up their nefarious plan (see the whole thing after the jump):

The TPP is likely to export some of the worst features of U.S. copyright law to Pacific Rim countries: a broad ban on breaking digital locks on devices and creative works (even for legal purposes), a minimum copyright term of the lifetime of the creator plus seventy years (the current international norm is the lifetime plus fifty years), privatization of enforcement for copyright infringement, ruinous statutory damages with no proof of actual harm, and government seizures of computers and equipment involved in alleged infringement. Moreover, the TPP is worst than U.S. copyright rules: it does not export the many balances and exceptions that favor the public interest and act as safety valves in limiting rightsholders’ protection. Adding insult to injury, the TPP's temporary copies provision will likely create chilling effects on how people and companies behave online and their basic ability to use and create on the Web.

Canadian government trying to launder secret copyright treaties into law

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:54:01 +0000

Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology released its report on the Intellectual Property Regime in Canada yesterday. While most the recommendations are fairly innocuous, the report involves a classic case of policy laundering as the government has fabricated support for the Canada - EU Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) provisions that were not even raised at committee. The report recommends ratifying four intellectual property treaties, despite the fact the treaties weren't discussed before committee.

"Why? Leaked versions of CETA and TPP both include requirements to ratify them. Should Canada reach agreement on CETA or the TPP, the committee report will presumably be used by the government to short-circuit further review on those treaties or to simply claim support for ratification on the basis on a committee recommendation that was secretly fabricated behind closed doors without any witness raising the issue during the public hearings."

Industry Committee Report on Intellectual Property: A Case of Policy Laundering for CETA and TPP

Public interest groups fly to Auckland, NZ to meet with TPP negotiators, are only allowed in the building to give a 15-minute joint presentation

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 03:55:42 +0000

Having been promised a chance to meet with the delegates at the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership treaty meeting in New Zealand, a representatives from nonprofit public interest groups around the world flew to Auckland. Once they arrived, the TPP announced that they would be granted 15 minutes, total, for all of the groups to make a statement.

TPP is a sweeping copyright treaty, a kind of ACTA on steroids, being conducted without any public scrutiny or input -- only governments and giant corporations are welcome in the negotiating room. It has profound implications for the future of medicine, Internet regulation, and privacy and surveillance.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the groups that sent a representative to Auckland. They've published an open letter signed by the public interest coalition protesting their shabby treatment at the hands of TPP's administrators.

Academics, experts, consumer groups, Internet freedom organizations, libraries, educational institutions, patients and access to medicines groups have flown a long way from around the world to Auckland, New Zealand, to engage with delegates in the 15th round of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
For the first time, however, we have been locked out of the entire venue, except for a single day out of the 10 days of negotiations. This not only alienates us as members of public interest groups, but also the hundreds of thousands of innovators, educators, patients, students, and Internet users who have sent messages to government representatives expressing their concerns with the TPP. All of us oppose the complete unjustifiable secrecy around the negotiations, but more importantly, the IP provisions that could potentially threaten our rights, and innovation.
These new physical restrictions on us are reflective of the ongoing lack of transparency that has plagued the TPP negotiations from the very beginning.

Digital Rights Groups Shut Out of Secret TPP Negotiations

LEAKED! TPP: the Son of ACTA will oblige America and other countries to throw out privacy, free speech and due process for easier copyright enforcement

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 01:00:04 +0000

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the son of ACTA, a secretive copyright and trade treaty being negotiated by the Pacific Rim nations, including the USA and Canada. As with ACTA, the secretive negotiation process means that the treaty's provisions represent an extremist corporate agenda where due process, privacy and free expression are tossed out the window in favor of streamlined copyright enforcement. If this passes, America will have a trade obligation to implement all the worst stuff in SOPA, and then some. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Carolina Rossini and Kurt Opsahl explain:

TPP article 16.3 mandates a system of ISP liability that goes beyond DMCA standards and U.S. case law. In sum, the TPP pushes a framework beyond ACTA[1] and possibly the spirit of the DMCA, since it opens the doors for:
* Three-strikes policies and laws that require Internet intermediaries to terminate their users’ Internet access on repeat allegations of copyright infringement
* Requirements for Internet intermediaries to filter all Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material
* ISP obligations to block access to websites that allegedly infringe or facilitate copyright infringement
* Efforts to force intermediaries to disclose the identities of their customers to IP rightsholders on an allegation of copyright infringement.

Incredibly, it gets worse:

If the copyright maximalists have their way, the TPP will include a “side-letter,” an agreement annexed to the TPP to bind the countries to strict procedures enabling copyright owners to insist material are removed from the Internet. This strict notice-and-takedown regime is not new—in 2004, Chile rejected the same proposal in its bi-lateral trade agreement with the United States. Without the shackles of the proposed requirements, Chile then implemented a much more balanced takedown procedure in its 2010 Copyright Law, which provides greater protection to Internet users’ expression and privacy than the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s copyright safe harbor regime.
Instead of ensuring due process and judicial involvement in takedowns, the TPP proposal encourages the spread of models that have been proven inefficient and have chilling unintended consequences, such as the HADOPI Law in France or the DMCA.

TPP Creates Legal Incentives For ISPs To Police The Internet. What Is At Risk? Your Rights.

What's wrong with TPP, the son of ACTA

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:52:14 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Carolina Rossini has a very good editorial explaining what's wrong with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secret trade treaty with punishing copyright provisions that's being negotiated by the USA, repeating the worst sins of ACTA and magnifying them (among other thing, TPP will make implementing the notorious SOPA into a trade obligation for the US).

As Rossini writes, this is no way to make good policy, and undermines the legitimate trade priorities of the US and its partners by entangling them in a dirty, secretive process that has no checks on the excesses of corporate representatives from the entertainment industry.

So, in summary, the USTR has released a public blog post about a secret proposal to expand something – a filtering mechanism on copyright limitations and exceptions – which might have real social, moral, and economic value. And all we know is that the only thing the authors of the proposal really wanted to make public was the fact that no matter what the content was, it was subject to enough international restrictions that it could be effectively gutted. The only thing 21st century about that is they used a blog to tell us about it.

Is the TPP - framed as a "21st century" agreement - the best way to build a 21st century society?

Why the ebook you want isn't for sale in your country

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:53:01 +0000

Tor Books' senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden takes to the comments of John Scalzi's Whatever to explain why ebooks are often not available at all places in the world at the same time. It's a combination of the way that publishers feel about e-rights (publishers who acquire print rights almost always demand e-rights, too), the fact that writers and their agents sometimes feel that they can make more money by selling to different publishers in different regions, and the fact that ebook retailers have a hard time keeping things straight when it comes to who has the right to sell where, and generally default to the "safe" choice of not selling at all when there's any doubt.

John and his agent could have sold us the “World English” package of rights, which would entitle us to publish the book in English everywhere–we would certainly have been willing to offer for that–but instead they opted to take the slightly riskier path of selling us rights only in our core market, reserving the “UK-and-a-bunch-of-Commonwealth-and-former-Commonwealth-countries” package to themselves, in order to try to sell it separately to a British publisher. (This is a slightly riskier path for most genre writers who aren’t top-level New York Times bestsellers, because British publishers don’t really buy very much SF and fantasy from the US below that sales level. This wasn’t always the case but it certainly is now.) After a period during which I imagine John’s agent shopped the book around to various British publishers (I don’t know the details because it’s, literally, not my business), they accepted an offer from Gollancz. However, that deal was concluded just a month or two ago, so it was vanishingly unlikely that Gollancz was going to get their edition out simultaneously with ours. I believe their edition is scheduled for November...
The more interesting question you ask is: Why can you, in South Africa, buy a copy of the US REDSHIRTS hardcover from (for instance) bn.com in the US, but you can’t buy the US e-book edition? Why do online retailers pay attention to your address and credit card when assessing your eligibility to buy an e-book, while being willing to ship any edition of any print book anywhere?
The answer is a little arcane, but bear with me. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to traditional printed books, neither the retail booksellers nor their customers (that’s you) are party to the contracts between John and his various publishers. Our contract with John says that _we_ won’t sell our editions of his book outside the territories in which John grants us exclusive and non-exclusive rights. Gollancz’s contract with John says that _they_ won’t sell their editions of his book outside the territories in which John grants them exclusive and non-exclusive rights. But if Amazon buys a bunch of copies in the US and someone in South Africa says “Hi, here’s my credit card, send me one,” no contractual agreement has been violated. Amazon owns those books, not us. They can do what they want with them, including selling them to people in South Africa, Shropshire, or the moons of Jupiter. Amazon is not John Scalzi, Tor, or Gollancz. You are not John Scalzi, Tor, or Gollancz.

One small quibble with Patrick's otherwise excellent explanation: there are, in fact, some international restrictions on what's called "parallel importation" or "grey market selling," where a retailer imports goods intended for sale in country X and offers them for sale in country Y. Recent trade treaties (especially ACTA and TPP) have attempted to strengthen these restrictions, and an apocalyptically stupid Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Decision has further eroded this practice.

The entertainment industry's representatives deliberately blur the lines between counterfeiting, infringement and parallel importation. When you hear that ACTA is a treaty intended to fight "counterfeiting," you probably don't think that the "counterfeit" jewelry, DVDs, books, and perfume under discussion is the actual, bona fide item, manufactured for sale in poor countries and imported without permission to a rich country. Most of us understand that a "counterfeit Omega watch" is a fake Omega watch, not a real Omega watch that was manufactured for sale in India and then imported to the USA.

The white-hot center of this stupidity is the watch trade. For example, "genuine Rolex products can only be imported with the permission of the trademark owner, Rolex Watch U.S.A. Inc. A private individual can hand carry one Rolex watch from a trip overseas without obtaining permission. Bring in more than one, and they will all be seized as a trademark violation. Purchasing a Rolex from overseas by mail is also a trademark violation."

Why is the ebook version not made available worldwide considering there are no physical constraints that may apply for the hardcopy version?" (via Making Light)

(Image: International currency, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 53936799@N05's photostream)

Public protests at the Dallas meeting on secret TPP copyright treaty

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:07:32 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Maira Sutton has a long, engrossing account of the popular protest at the Dallas session of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive treaty negotiation that includes a set of copyright rules that leave SOPA and ACTA in the dust. TPP's organizers -- especially in the USA -- have been hostile to any public participation or transparency. They even ordered a hotel to cancel the reservation made by activists who wanted to host their own parallel information session and then lied about it. Undaunted, activists, civil society groups, copyfighters, and other interested parties continue to dog TPP's heels. The Dallas meeting saw the notorious Yes Men "Corporate Power Tool" award ceremony. Even better, the hotel's bathrooms had their toilet paper replaced with TPP TP, custom-printed rolls that explained the problems with TPP.

Since the official planned event was scarcely sufficient to make a significant impact, Public Knowledge and American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property co-hosted a side event for negotiators to learn about the threats of harsh copyright enforcement. The panel included EFF’s International IP Director, Gwen Hinze, who spoke about the unbalanced outcomes non-U.S. Internet users and innovators would face if the current version of the IP chapter were passed. While the event was well-attended, civil society were ultimately forced to bear all the costs to put on this event.
Last week, 32 legal scholars sent a letter to the office of the USTR demanding transparency in the process. Including the release of the text and demand for real participation from civil society, they demanded the immediate release of “reports on US positions and proposals on intellectual property matters that are currently given only to Industry Trade Advisory Committee members under confidentiality agreements.” This is key because there is nothing that could justify the withholding of such reports that simply outline the U.S. position on intellectual property from the public. This is especially true given the fact that the U.S. government’s proposals could impede Congress from engaging in domestic legal reform of legislation regulating IP.
The USTR sent them a preliminary response the following day. Ambassador Kirk essentially blew them off, claiming that they have taken “extraordinary efforts” to have the whole negotiation process inclusive of civil society and the public. In the letter, he compared the level of transparency to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) meetings, which indeed have always been top secret and therefore offer a laughably low bar of comparison.

TPP: Internet Freedom Activists Protest Secret Trade Agreement Being Negotiated This Week

Nerd fatalism, nerd determinism: the problem with nerd politics

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:46:57 +0000

My latest Guardian column is "The problem with nerd politics," and it discusses the twin evils of "nerd determinism" and "nerd fatalism" -- both convenient excuses for people who care about technology policy to avoid politics.

In "nerd determinism," technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.
But, while it's true that geeks can get around this sort of thing – and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers – this isn't enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn't matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.
What's more, things that aren't legal don't attract monetary investment. In the UK, where it's legal to unlock your mobile phone, you can just walk into shops all over town and get your handset unlocked while you wait. When this was illegal in the US (it's marginally legal at the moment), only people who could navigate difficult-to-follow online instructions could unlock their phones. No merchant would pay to staff a phone-unlocking role at the corner shop (my dry-cleaner has someone sitting behind a card-table who'll unlock any phone you bring him for a fiver). Without customers, the people who make phone-unlocking tools will only polish them to the point where they're functional for their creators. The kind of polish that marks the difference between a tool and a product is often driven by investment, markets and commercialism.

The problem with nerd politics

Yes Men punk TPP and US Trade Ambassador with fake "Corporate Power Tool Award"

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:57:58 +0000

US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk was in Dallas to kick off a corporate power-event to drum up support for the foundering, secretive Transpacific Partnership, a secret treaty that builds on the work of ACTA to establishing punishing copyright laws that include mandatory surveillance and censorship. The Yes Men crashed the gala, taking the podium to present Kirk with a "Corporate Power Tool Award," which he tried to accept, but his minders from the Secret Service wouldn't let him.

The first action began when a smartly-dressed man approached the podium immediately after the gala's keynote speech by Ron Kirk, U.S. Trade Representative and former mayor of Dallas. The man (local puppeteer David Goodwin) introduced himself as "Git Haversall," president of the "Texas Corporate Power Partnership," and announced he was giving Kirk and other U.S. trade negotiators the "2012 Corporate Power Tool Award," which "Haversall's" partner held aloft.
The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and "Haversall" continued: "I'd like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right."
At that point, the host of the reception took the microphone back and announced that the evening's formal programming had concluded. But Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.
Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed "delegates" (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted "TPP! TPP! TPP!" for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.

Party ends badly for U.S. trade reps, federal agents (via David Akin)

Hilary Clinton to world governments: the world will divide into "open" and "closed" societies based on their Internet policies

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:19:20 +0000

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeated her view that the world's governments should respect Internet freedom, telling the Brasilia Open Government Summit that the world is dividing into "open" and "closed" societies characterized by their attitude towards net freedom. It's a laudable sentiment, but as they say, "We know you love freedom, we just wish you'd share." After all, America is one of the world's leading exporters of Internet censorship and surveillance laws (in the form of its intervention into copyright laws, as well as instigating unaccountable, secret copyright treaty negotiations like ACTA and TPP. They're also the world's leading exporter of Internet surveillance and censorship technology, thanks first to the US national requirement that telcoms companies buy equipment that allows for direct police surveillance, and the aggressive sale of this surveillance and control technology to the world's dictatorship by US firms.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Open Government Partnership in Brasilia, she said countries could only become more secure and peaceful if they were open. "In the 21st century, the US is convinced that one of the most significant divisions between nations will be not between east or west, nor over religion, so much as between open and closed societies," she said.
"We believe those governments that hide from public view and dismiss ideas of openness and the aspirations of their people for greater freedom will find it increasingly difficult to create a secure society."

It's particularly galling that Secretary Clinton made these remarks even as the US Congress is poised to pass CISPA, which establishes a national US regime of censorship and warrantless surveillance.

Open or closed society is key dividing line of 21st century, says Hillary Clinton

(Image: Clinton Rally 90, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kakissel's photostream)

Understanding TPP, ACTA's nastier, more secret little brother

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:00:32 +0000

On TechDirt, Glyn Moody covers the highlights of a new report by Carrie Ellen Sager of infojustice.org that compares the provisions in ACTA, the secretly negotiated copyright treaty currently up for adoption in Europe, the USA and other countries; and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a more extreme, more secretive version of ACTA being negotiated by various Pacific Rim countries.

On "Technological Protection Measures" TPP has two nasty turns of the infringement screw:
TPP goes beyond ACTA by applying provisions on technological protection where circumvention is carried out unknowingly or without reasonable grounds to know.
and
TPP goes beyond ACTA by explicitly limiting the possible limitations and exclusions to the TPM circumvention rules, while ACTA gives a country free reign to create exceptions and limitations it finds reasonable.
The second of those is particularly troublesome, since it reduces the scope for signatories to introduce more balanced copyright laws even if they wanted to.

Where TPP Goes Beyond ACTA -- And How It Shows Us The Future Of IP Enforcement

US Trade Rep doesn't know what "transparent" or "lobbyist" means

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:58:07 +0000

The US Trade Representative claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, closed-door copyright treaty being negotiated in even greater secrecy than the notorious ACTA, is "transparent." Actually, he says it has "unprecedented" transparency, because an advisory group is allowed to see it under nondisclosure, and they're not lobbyists at all. Except they are. And except that the norm for copyright treaties used to be UN treaties, negotiated in full public view, not closed-door arm-twisting marathons where the US Trade Rep and a bunch of industry goons threaten foreign nations into signing onto agreements that even the US Congress couldn't pass into law.

Petition to uncloak secret copyright treaty

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:12:19 +0000

A welcome White House petition for our American readers' consideration: a request to make the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty negotiation more transparent. This bland-sounding treaty is, in fact, the successor to ACTA, negotiated in the strictest secrecy. A recent leak from the TPP smoke-filled rooms revealed that negotiators are considering regulating incidental copies made in buffers, a deep foray by regulatory fantasy into engineering reality. (via Techdirt)

US trade rep and hotel caught lying about confidentiality of secret copyright treaty meeting in Hollywood

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:26:36 +0000

If you follow Boing Boing, you're probably passingly familiar with ACTA, the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty negotiated in secret, comprising a kind of wishlist from the entertainment industry, pared down rather a lot after a series of leaks. The sequel to ACTA is TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, yet another secret copyright treaty with many of the same participants.

A coalition of civil society groups got wind of an upcoming TPP meeting in a Hollywood hotel and decided to rent out a function space in the same building so they could hold a public information meeting on TPP during the session. According to Techdirt, the US Trade Representative had the hotel cancel the civil society groups' reservation. The hotel claimed that the reservation was being canceled due to "a confidential group in house" and that "we will not be allowing any other groups in the meeting space that day."

Except that this turns out to have been a lie. When the civil society group called up and asked to rent a function room for an unrelated event, the hotel was happy to rent to them.

And, needless to say, the MPAA was able to get access to the TPP negotiators, who were escorted on a "multi-hour tour of 20th Century Fox Studios last night."

Hollywood Gets To Party With TPP Negotiators; Public Interest Groups Get Thrown Out Of Hotel

US copyright lobby to Canada: pass our stupid laws or we won't let you into the suicide pact!

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:10:44 +0000

Michael Geist sez, "The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada's entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations. The TPP raises significant concerns about extension of copyright and overbroad protection for digital locks, so staying out might be a good thing. However, the IIPA, which represents the major movie, music, and software lobby associations, sees this as an opportunity to force Canada to enact a Canadian DMCA and to implement ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It has told the US government to keep Canada out of the talks until those laws are passed, adding that any exception to protect Canadian culture will not be included in the TPP."

TPP is the second coming of ACTA, the last round of incalculably evil, back-room copyright shenanigans. This seems like a pretty big miscalculation from America's copyright-pushers: "If you don't pass the crazy, awful copyright laws we've demanded, we won't let you be a part of our suicide-by-copyright-pact." Say it ain't so!

US Copyright Lobby Wants Canada Out of TPP Until New Laws Passed, Warns of No Cultural Exceptions

Global Chokepoints: new activist coalition monitors censorship through global copyright enforcement rules

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:57:41 +0000

A global coalition of activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation have created "Global Chokepoints," a worldwide initiative to monitor censorship arising from copyright enforcement.

Global Chokepoints will document the escalating global efforts to turn Internet intermediaries into chokepoints for online free expression. Internet intermediaries all over the world—from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to community-driven sites like Twitter and YouTube to online payment processors—are increasingly facing demands by IP rightsholders and governments to remove, filter, or block allegedly infringing or illegal content, as well as to collect and disclose their users' personal data.
At the same time, it's unclear whether and under what circumstances Internet intermediaries have liability for content posted by their users. Hotly contested court cases in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere are considering how copyright law fits with obligations to protect Internet users' rights of privacy, due process, and freedom of expression.
Global Chokepoints analyzes global trends in four types of copyright censorship: 1) three-strikes policies and laws that require Internet intermediaries to terminate their users' Internet access on repeat allegations of copyright infringement; 2) requirements for Internet intermediaries to filter all Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material; 3) ISP obligations to block access to websites that allegedly infringe or facilitate copyright infringement; and 4) efforts to force intermediaries to disclose the identities of their customers to IP rightsholders upon allegations of copyright infringement. The site includes links to digital rights organizations, consumer groups, law school clinics, and technology industry groups that are opposing the spread of overbroad copyright policing efforts, as well as national advocacy campaigns to protect the free and open Internet and citizens' fundamental rights.

New Global Chokepoints Project Tracks Censorship Around the World

America fields "Son of ACTA" -- a new, sinister, secret copyright treaty

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 08:03:55 +0000

Knowledge Ecology International has published a leaked draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the latest secret, US-led treaty, this one targeting countries on the Pacific rim. The IP chapter of the agreement contains all the material that the US was forced to drop from ACTA, the last secret copyright treaty the States tried to sneak into the world. As with ACTA, the game plan for TPP will be to get a bunch of rich, powerful countries to sign on, and then use this as a benchmark for all treaties between those nations and the rest of the world.

Here's some of Michael Geist's analysis:

The U.S. plan is everything it wanted in ACTA but didn't get. For example, the digital lock rules are the U.S. DMCA, complete with exact same exceptions (no more, no less). The term of copyright matches the U.S. term of life of the author plus 70 years, beyond the Berne requirement and Canadian law. The ISP provisions including a copy of the U.S. notice-and-takedown system as well as provisions that go beyond U.S. law. In other words, the U.S. envisions using the TPP to export its copyright law to as many countries as possible while creating backdoor changes to its own domestic laws. Moreover, the chapter extends well beyond copyright, with patent provisions that would restrict countries' ability to restrict patentable subject matter.

The complete Feb 10, 2011 text of the US proposal for the TPP IPR chapter