March 13th, 2009
Obama continues Bush's secrecy policy on mysterious IP trade deal
OK, just what is so secret about a copyright-protection treaty? There is this proposal - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It’s a secret and repugnant proposed treaty with some pretty extreme provisions. Only what we know about the provisions is limited to what has leaked out, because the actual terms have been declared a secret.
That’s what the Bush Administration said. And, now, that’s the Obama Administration’s position, too. News.com reports that the Administration has denied a FOIA request for information about the treaty based on a national security rationale.
Here’s the letter from the Executive Office of the President to James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, who had filed a freedom of information request to find out the details of ACTA.
[T]he documents you seek are being witheld in full pursuant to 5 U.S.C. §552(b)(1), which pertains to information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958. Inasmuch as this constitutes a complete grant of your request, I am closing your file in this office.
According to Declan McCullagh’s report:
Love’s group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement that has “no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.”
Most of what is known comes from a leaked document on WikiLeaks, although speculation includes required ISP monitoring of consumers’ Internet activity, a ban on P2P and criminalization of legitimate IP-sharing activities.
