Techdirt. Stories about "iipa"

IIPA Wants Canada And Spain On The 'Naughty' Special 301 List Even Though They Brought In Tough New Copyright Laws

Glyn Moody — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:40:28 PST

Here on Techdirt, one of the things we look forward to each year is the comedy production known as the 301 Report, where the US makes the world line up in a row, and then names and shames all the naughty countries whose intellectual monopoly laws aren't outrageous enough. In advance of the official naughty list, there are helpful suggestions from the fans of monopoly maximalism, including the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which has just released its 2013 demands. Mostly it's the usual suspects -- China, India, Russia etc. But there's an interesting change from the previous year's list: Canada has moved from the really naughty "Priority Watch List" to the only slightly naughty "Watch List".

As Michael Geist points out, far from being good news, that's outrageous:

Those that thought passing Bill C-11 -- the Canadian copyright reform bill that contained some of the most restrictive digital lock rules in the world -- would satisfy U.S. groups will be disappointed. The IIPA wants Canada back on the piracy watch list, one notch below the Special Watch List (where the US placed Canada last year).

Despite the praise for Bill C-11 last year, the groups are right back in criticism mode and demanding reforms. The IIPA is now unsure if the enabler provision will help stop sites that facilitate infringement (despite the fact that its members have yet to use the provision) and concerned with the prospect of new exceptions to the digital lock rules. In fact, its criticisms of the rules for Internet providers (it wants a notice-and-takedown system, tougher rules on search engines that link to infringing content, and new rules to target repeat infringers) are so strong that the organization implausibly claims possible non-compliance with the WIPO Internet treaties.

Nor is Canada the only country that might be surprised to find itself on the naughty step again. As Mike explained last year, Spain was removed from the official Special 301 list for being an obedient little vassal state and bringing in the punitive Ley Sinde, as instructed, despite huge public and business opposition. And now, guess what? The IIPA already wants Spain back on the list for not doing enough in this area (pdf): Contrary to the expectations surrounding the implementation of ley Sinde that led to Spain's removal from the Special 301 Watch List last year, Spain saw no positive developments in 2012.
Let's hope Canada and Spain -- and everyone else -- draw the obvious conclusion from the IIPA's latest calls: that no matter what countries do, no matter what legislation they bring in, and no matter what disproportionately harsh punishments they inflict on their own people, it will never, ever be enough, and there will always be further demands, and further threats to put them back on the naughty lists. The only solution is to stand up to this blackmail once and for all, and to treat the Special 301 list with the contempt it deserves.

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Entertainment Industry Flips Out At The Good Parts Of Canada's New Copyright Law, Demands Changes Via TPP

Mike Masnick — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 07:26:59 PDT

In discussing Canada's C-11 copyright reform, we noted that while we were troubled by the "digital locks" provision that mirrors the DMCA's ridiculous anti-circumvention rules, there was actually plenty of good things in the law, that other countries should take note of. Not surprisingly, the entertainment industry feels differently. With Canada joining the TPP negotiations, entertainment industry lobbyists are seeing it as an opportunity to roll back all of the good parts of Canada's copyright law. Michael Geist has the story on how the IIPA -- an organization made up of a bunch of other copyright maximalist organizations, like the RIAA and MPAA -- have put in a filing that argues TPP should wipe out many of the reasonable parts of Canada's new copyright law:

The IIPA, which recently submitted its position on Canada's entry to the TPP as part of a U.S. regulatory process, takes particular issue with the role of Internet providers in enforcing Canadian copyright law. The Canadian "notice-and-notice" approach, which requires providers to forward thousands of infringement allegation notices to their subscribers, strikes a balance between effective enforcement and free speech, while preserving users' privacy.

The model has begun to attract global attention with countries such as Chile adopting it within its own domestic law. The IIPA sharply criticizes the approach, however, calling for dramatic reforms. It argues that Canadian law "fails to provide meaningful incentives for network service providers to co-operate with copyright owners to deal with copyright infringements that take place in the digital network environment."

Instead, the copyright lobby wants Canada to implement measures that would require Internet providers "to take action to prevent recidivists from repeatedly using their services to commit copyright infringement." The plain language demand: a termination system that would cut off Internet access for subscribers accused of infringement.

The IIPA also wants Canada to undo statutory damages changes from Bill C-11 that created a liability cap of $5,000 for non-commercial infringement. It claims that the non-commercial cap renders statutory damages "ineffective in achieving its goals of full compensation and deterrence in the online environment."

Even with the change, Canada remains one of the only developed countries with statutory damages that create the prospect of multi-million dollar damage awards for commercial infringement. The government created the non-commercial cap because it was uncomfortable with rules that could spur thousands of lawsuits against individuals.

This isn't surprising, of course. These groups have always used international trade agreements to force through IP laws that they can't get otherwise. In fact, what's slightly ironic is that the whole reason that Canada was pressured to put in place C-11 in the first place, was because all of these same trade groups kept insisting that Canada was not living up to its "international obligations" with regards to earlier copyright-related agreements. So now that Canada has updated its law with some good ideas and some bad... the industry goes running right back to international agreement negotiations to try to delete the good parts, which it doesn't like.

And, really, this is a big part of the problem with all the secrecy around the TPP. While the process in Canada to approve C-11 certainly had its issues, at least the bill itself was public and was open to significant discussion for quite some time. And if you look back to previous attempts to reform copyright law in Canada, the proposals had gone through significant public scrutiny. None of that will happen with the TPP, which is still being negotiated in secret, and will only be revealed as a done deal: take it or leave it. And none of it will involve real input from the public, who can give talks around the edges of the negotiation, but are never invited to comment on the actual proposals at all. Of course, the entertainment industry, being on various "advisory committees," do have full access to TPP negotiating docs.

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The USPTO's Reality Distortion Field: Web Filter Blocks Critics Like EFF, Welcomes Maximalist Lobbyists

Mike Masnick — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:52:00 PDT

Updated: At 5pm ET, the USPTO called Jamie to say that a contractor had set this up, and after reviewing their policies, they had stopped blocking such sites...

Well this is bizarre. Jamie Love from KEI was over at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a meeting about "global negotiations on intellectual property and access to medicine." The meeting itself was held in a room that it uses for the USPTO's Global Intellectual Property Academy (GIPA), and there is free WiFi for people to use. Love tried to log onto his own website... and found that it was being blocked as a "political/activist group."

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)

Your request was denied because this URL contains content that is categorized as: "Political/Activist Groups" which is blocked by USPTO policy. If you believe the categorization is inaccurate, please contact the USPTO Service Desk and request a manual review of the URL.

For assistance, contact USPTO OCIO IT Service Desk. (io-proxy4)

Love then checked a bunch of other sites... and noticed a rather distressing pattern. For public interest groups who advocate that the existing copyright/patent system is broken, the websites were all blocked. ACLU, EFF, Public Knowledge, Public Citizen, CDT... all blocked. However, if you're a lobbyist for maximalism? No problem! MPAA, RIAA, IIPA, IPI, PHRMA, BSA... come on through. They do allow Creative Commons. Thankfully (for us, at least), they don't seem to block blogs that talk about this stuff. Techdirt is allowed, as are things like BoingBoing, Groklaw and Larry Lessig and Michael Geist's blogs. Though, oddly, a bunch of political sites (DailyKos, TPM, RedState, Rush Limgaugh's site) are blocked.

It may be an "over active" filter -- but it does seem particularly disturbing that all those groups who fight for the public's rights on the very issues the USPTO is dealing with on a regular basis have their sites completely blocked.

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Hollywood Lobbyist Hasn't Seen The TPP Text, Cannot Read The TPP Text, But Knows What's In The TPP Text?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:31:00 PDT

The Daily Dot's Kevin Collier has a detailed article about his experience as a journalist at the latest TPP negotiating round. He talks mainly about the various "stakeholder" presentations, which are the only access concerned groups have to the negotiators. As we've already noted, the USTR made sure to limit access to the stakeholder presentations, giving them 8 to 10 minutes (reduced from a promised 15) and then scheduling a bunch to run concurrently -- and during a time when many negotiators would likely be out to lunch. From Collier's report, we also learn that the rooms where these presentations were held only had about 20 seats in them -- and there are more than 400 negotiators. He attended the EFF's presentation, but also noted that "Attendees from a nearby presentation exited their conference room and loudly spoke outside the open door to [the EFF's Carolina] Rossini’s room, drowning out her message."

But, perhaps more interesting was Collier's encounter with Michael Schlesinger, a lobbyist for the IIPA (the International Intellectual Property Alliance -- a sort of "super group" of lobbying organizations, including both the RIAA and the MPAA, among others). The IIPA presentation immediately followed the EFF presentation, and involved Schlesinger promising to debunk the "myths" being spread by folks like the EFF. Key among them? That TPP would mandate disconnecting people from the internet. Myth, myth and more myth, Schlesigner declared: there are "no mandates to kick legitimate users off the Internet." Note the weasel word "legitimate."

However, Collier wasn't born yesterday. So he went and found the leaked draft of the IP section that was revealed back in February of 2011. And he noted that it does seem to include mandates for kicking people offline, such as saying that "effective action against any act of copyright infringement" would include things like "removing or disabling access... [and] terminating specified accounts." So, Collier went and found Schlesigner to bring this up, and Schlesinger made a remarkable admission: he claims he hasn't seen the text:

I asked him whether he stood by his presentation's claim that "TPP will result in 'kicking people off the Internet'" was a myth.

"It is," he said.

I showed him a printed-out copy of the section of the TPP leak that referred to "terminating specified accounts" of copyright infringers.

He visibly stiffened. "I'm not commenting on a leaked draft," he told me. "From what I know, the TPP framework would not force anyone off the Internet. I don't know anything about the TPP draft."

Had Schlesinger actually read the TPP, either the leaked chapter or the current draft? I can't say for sure. Legally, he can't have read the latter, because he's a federally registered lobbyist, which would bar him from seeing the text.

Got that? (1) He's not allowed to see the text. (2) He gets upset when someone points him to the leaked text. (3) He... also insists he knows, absolutely, what will not be in the text. How is that even remotely credible?

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Copyright Industries Massive Success Shows That They're Dying And Need More Draconian Copyright Laws?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 3 Nov 2011 14:38:25 PDT

One of the favorite misleading tricks of supporters of more draconian copyright laws is to put out a report each year about the "size" of "the copyright industries," by the "International Intellectual Property Alliance" (a trade group made up of other trade groups, including the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, ESA, NMPA and others) There are numerous problems with this report. First off, it makes the ridiculously wrong assumption that "the copyright industries" exist solely because of copyright law. That is, they use the size of the numbers to suggest that stronger copyright law is necessary. Yet that's ridiculous. They present no evidence that the industries would be any different size, if copyright law were weaker or stronger. They simply present that as the obvious implication. Furthermore, their definition of what makes up "the copyright industries" is insanely broad, and tends to include plenty of operations who don't actually want stricter copyright laws at all. For example, I'm sure Techdirt technically qualifies under whatever measure they're using. After all, we're a publisher, so technically we're in "the content industries." Yet I can tell you right now that exactly zero percent of our revenue is due to copyright law. That's true of many, many of the companies included as being in "the copyright industries."

Unfortunately, this myth persists that if you add up all of the broadly defined "content industries," it somehow shows why you need stricter copyright. But that makes no sense. If they actually showed a direct causal relationship -- or even any evidence that copyright policy directly drives aggregate revenue, they might have some argument. But they don't go near such things. But it doesn't stop grandstanding around the issue. With the latest release, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Orrin Hatch, along with Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Adam Schiff, welcomed the various lobbyists who produced this report (i.e., the heads of the ESA, NMPA, RIAA and MPAA) to cheer on the report and use it to falsely pretend this is proof that more draconian copyright laws are important.

This makes no sense and, frankly, it insults the intelligence of just about everyone, to pretend that total revenue within an industry is the automatic indicator of how policy should be determined for that industry. You determine policies based on deltas, not absolutes.

It gets even worse, when you look at the actual report, which shows the industries in question are doing tremendously well. In fact, as many are noting, the report actually appears to undermine the industry's entire argument that "piracy" is somehow decimating their businesses. Instead -- even through a recession, these companies are making a ton of money, and there's no evidence of significant job losses.

It's a pretty weak move when our Congressional leaders to then take those points, that simply do not support the need for more copyright law in any way... and then use it to support such policies. Each year, of course, CCIA puts out a report that shows that if that's how you're going to calculate "the copyright industries," it's only fair to use the same methodology to calculate the industries that are built from "exceptions to copyright law," which turns out to be significantly larger than "the copyright industries." So if any of the elected officials praising this latest report are intellectually honest, they should actually be advocating for weaker copyright laws. After all, the same methodology shows that exceptions to copyright law contribute much more to the economy than copyright law itself.

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IIPA's Section 301 Filing Shows It's Really Not At All Interested In Reducing Copyright Infringement

Mike Masnick — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:44:00 PST

We've covered some of the better comments to the USTR over the Special 301 report, such as the submission from the CCIA. But, of course, there were some ridiculous submissions as well -- and at the top of the list has to be the submission from the IIPA -- the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a trade association/lobbying group of trade associations/lobbying groups (including the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, ESA and NMPA) that proudly highlights how it has filed comments for the Special 301 report since such things began in 1988. But what's stunning is what the report effectively admits. Even though it claims to want to focus on ways to cut down on copyright infringement, the details show it wants the exact opposite. That's because in reports on a variety of countries, the IIPA seems to suggest that policies encouraging or mandating the use of open source software is somehow a bad thing.

But if your goal is to actually reduce infringement, then wouldn't you want to encourage the use of legal software? And by encouraging the use of open source software, you are making it that much less likely that infringement will be a problem, since the software will be cheaper. Basically, the IIPA is flat out admitting that it's not actually interested in reduced copyright infringement. It's abusing the USTR's Special 301 process to set up protectionist policies for the companies and organizations it represents -- and trying to use that process to deny efforts to actually reduce infringement.

This is really incredible when you think about it. Even though the USTR 301 report is supposed to be about figuring out ways to reduce infringement in countries around the world, the IIPA is trying to shoehorn open source software into the mix, claiming that it's somehow worse than infringing. While many of the IIPA's complaints have to do with mandates for open source software, it even goes after Indonesia, which is just recommending gov't agencies consider open source software -- and here, the IIPA basically exposes its agenda even further:

It encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations. As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights...

Yes, you read that right. The IIPA is claiming that telling people to consider open source technologies -- which are not at all "anti-intellectual property rights" -- "fails to build respect for intellectual property rights" and doesn't properly value intellectual creations. In other words, in the eyes of the IIPA, properly licensed software that happens to be under an open source license is worse than infringing because of its price.

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Copyright Lobbyists Again Demand That The US Classify Canada As Being A Piracy Hotbed

Mike Masnick — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:35:13 PST

Every year, the entertainment industry comes out with some ridiculous report about how Canada is a hotbed of piracy, on par with places like China and Russia. Every year the report asks the US Trade Representative to classify Canada as being on the "Priority Watch List." And, once again, it's that time... the International Intellectual Property Assn., a copyright lobbying group, has again complained about rampant Canadian piracy. In the past, Michael Geist has shown in great detail how silly these claims are. This year, it's gotten so ridiculous that he barely has anything to say at all, but instead simply points back to his responses from the past few years. In the past, the USTR has refused to go along with the IIPA's demands. Let's hope that this doesn't change with the new administration -- who, so far, has appeared much more willing to listen to Hollywood's friends. The only potential good news is that Obama's first choice for USTR (currently representing Hollywood in Congress -- literally) backed away from the job after fearing that "trade" wasn't a priority to this administration. Just imagine what would have happened if he had taken the job.

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