ACTA: Improving but problems remain
The ACTA treaty negotiation process is still going strong. The participants apparently feel pressured to finalise the agreement before the end of the year and have agreed to an extra negotiating round in Washington next week to help hurry things up.
The most recent leaked text shows that progress is being made on the details while some major disagreements (mainly around the scope of the agreement - should an anti-counterfeiting agreement also include patents and geographic indications) are yet to be resolved.
In our last summary article about ACTA we raised five issues where we thought that the treaty was a threat to justice and civil liberties.
Here we revisit them and find significant improvement in three of those issues and minor improvements in the other two.
Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data
Jonathan Penney, the Cyberlaw Fellow at Victoria University gave a public talk about the idea of "internet as a right" and whether there is any basis for this in current New Zealand law.
He started by looking at s14 of the 1990 Bill of Rights Act. This is about freedom of expression:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.
Flowcharts for the new Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
Chris Esther has created some useful flowcharts that help explain some of the processes included in the new Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill. He has very kindly allowed us to repost them here.
A Week of ACTA
It's going to be a week of ACTA in Wellington, New Zealand.
- On Saturday (April 10th) we have PublicACTA organised by InternetNZ. It's a chance for people who oppose ACTA to get together and discuss how to stop it. Guest speakers include Canadian law professor Michael Geist and Australian academic Kim Weatherall.
- Then, the following week (April 12-16th) there's the latest round of the official ACTA negotiations.
Why we oppose ACTA
- We oppose the attempt to take away people's rights (due process, freedom of speech, right to own and use property) in an attempt to protect the business models of the big media and pharmaceutical industries.
- We oppose the secrecy around the ACTA negotiations. Democratic societies should debate their laws in public.
- We oppose the way that the ACTA treaty is an attempt to legislate by treaty, avoiding the normal democratic process in each of the participating countries.
Tech Liberty articles about ACTA
- ACTA and the New Copyright Deal
- ACTA - The NZ Official Information Act Requests
- Media Release: New Zealand has no place in anti-democratic ACTA negotiations
- IP: Singing from the Same Songbook
- Tech Liberty's submission to the Ministry of Economic Development about digital enforcement in ACTA.
Five New Things About ACTA
With the leak of the full text of ACTA, complete with every nuance of positions by the various countries involved, we have the first full and complete picture of what our government is up to.
Here's five things we learnt from reading the treaty.
Media Release: Tech Liberty supports new copyright bill
New copyright infringement act fair and practical
23 Feb 2009
Wellington, New Zealand
With the release of the text of the new copyright bill proposed at the end of 2009 we finally see the end of guilt on accusation, and see in place a sensible and well reasoned process around protecting copyrighted material. The new text deals with the majority of the issues that Tech Liberty has been concerned about, restores due process and privacy for those accused, and spells out a fair set of obligations and responsibilities for ISPs in handling users who infringe on copyright via their services.
Tech Liberty welcomes US defense of internet freedom
Yesterday, Hilary Clinton made a speech committing the USA to the cause of internet freedom.
We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.
Internet disconnection is impractical
We've already discussed why disconnecting the Internet to punish someone is an inappropriate response. We don't cut off people's power or water if they commit a crime using them, and the Internet is becoming as important as those infrastructural services. We need the Internet to communicate with family, to perform our jobs, to deal with the government, for education and for entertainment. The Internet is becoming increasingly vital to participating in modern society.
But, ignoring this important point for now, there are also a number of practical reasons why Internet disconnection doesn't work as a punishment for downloading unauthorised material.
Internet disconnection is not an option
Even so! Look! We live in a computerized world. I can't do a thing anywhere - I can't get information - I can't be fed - I can't amuse myself - I can't pay for anything, or check on anything, or just plain do anything - without using a computer.
- A Perfect Fit, Isaac Asimov, 1981
Why are we so interested in civil liberties? Surely they’re a luxury that we can’t afford in these economically depressed times, with war and terrorism on the international horizon?
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Recent Posts
- Submission: Search & Surveillance Bill
- Dissent, the internet and freedom
- ACTA: Improving but problems remain
- Internet filtering – time to let it go?
- Sky Television: A takedown conversation
- Sky’s Takedown Notices – Justice or Intimidation?
- ACTA: Say hello to statutory damages
- Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data
- Flowcharts for the new Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
- Privacy and Technology
- Submission – Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill
- Technology unveils past secrets
Dissent, the internet and freedom
Tech Liberty was formed because a group of us were concerned that governments were ignoring traditional civil liberties when it came to new technology. The New Zealand government had recently passed a digital copyright law that would see people punished without due process and were secretly introducing a new internet censorship regime. We decided that we needed to stick up for the civil liberties that underpin our democracy and keep our society healthy.
A recent article by Rob Weir does a good job of articulating what drives us. In How to Crush Dissent, he compares distributing information on the internet to the samizdat underground presses in the Eastern Bloc. He fears that our current anarchic level of information freedom could be temporary: