11.11.09
US Chamber Among the Shills for ACTA, Apparently
Summary: The US Chamber of Commerce claims “transparency” of ACTA to be satisfactory
IT WAS no surprise to many that Obama kept the ACTA secret [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14] after he had appointed a large number of RIAA lawyers to guard his legal institutions (fox, meet hen house). Many references are accumulated here.
Maybe it was reasonable to expect the United States Chamber to have higher standards, but recent incidents suggest that it has no shame, either. The Chamber abused copyright-related laws in order to have “Yes Men” sued for showing some guts in the face of policies that harm the environment and now we find the Chamber lying about ACTA. In a blog post, it claims: “The U.S. Chamber is unequivocally supportive of transparency and has been satisfied with the steps USTR has taken to make the ACTA negotiation process transparent.”
What utter nonsense. From the comments (there is only one):
The Obama Administration promised transparency, yet here you are defending secrecy because that is how it has always been done.
I am appalled by your organization’s support of ACTA and the secrecy around proposed ACTA terms. With this week’s leak of the proposed ACTA terms, your administrations claims of “national security” are obviously unfounded. The American People believe you are lying because you have sold them out to international special interest who wish to oppress people all over the world over commercial transgressions. There is no evidence that the egregious enforcement of copyright law against individual citizens will make people buy more product. Losses due to piracy are imagined. Reports sighting estimates of losses are completely fabricated, and the studies are paid by the industries that would benefit by these fabricated numbers.
We usually put ACTA news only in the daily links, but to make the exception, here is NBR speaking about it:
NZ should not sign international piracy agreement
[...]
This comment comes after the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) returned to the drawing board last week in Seoul, to further discuss how to implement and police global copyright and counterfeit matters, and to sign an international treaty.
There is also this: “Positive outcome reached at WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement while ACTA looms in the East”
The three day meeting of the WIPO ACE concluded on a positive note with the Committee requesting the WIPO Secretariat to ramp up its work on undertaking an “an empirical assessment of the nature and extent of intellectual infringements” given the paucity of reliable data detailing the value of “international trade in IPRs-infringing goods”.
For those who do not understand the impact of these Draconian laws, here is a good talk that covers it. WIPO too does not serve the people, it serves elite interests. All of these things directly harm Free software. █
