Jailbreak a phone, go to jail: Copyright law, the TPP way

Last year we witnessed a series of oafish attempts at legislation designed to reward the content cartel by eviscerating basic rights of Netizens. SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, CISPA — it didn’t matter. When one measure was defeated, another slightly different one would rise up to take its place.

It’s like a zombie movie, only when you cut off their heads, they grow a new one with a different name and keep on coming.

Well, guess what? There’s a new zombie in town named the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s a trade deal involving a dozen Pacific Rim nations and the United States, but with extraspecial benefits for copyright holders.

Toilet paper protections

Last week WikiLeaks (remember them?) published a chapter of the proposed treaty, dealing with intellectual property issues, which until now had been kept secret from the public. In addition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation outlines the many gifts for the content cartel contained in the treaty. They include:

• Yet another extension of copyright periods. Walt Disney may have had his head frozen and buried in a cryogenic vault 40 years ago, but if TPP passes, Mickey Mouse will still be under Disney’s lock and key for another 35 years to come.
• Forces countries with more enlightened copyright laws to adopt the industry-friendly protections found in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, perhaps the worst tech-related legislation ever passed.
• Makes copyright violation an offense punishable by criminal and civil penalties, while attempts to circumvent copy protection would be a separate offense, even when no copyright infringement has been alleged.

According to ExtremeTech’s Joel Hruska, the TPP could also strengthen software patents, limit access to generic medicines, and criminalize the jailbreaking of cellphones. Anybody got a problem with any of that?

Naturally, our Uncle in all his wisdom wants to fast-track approval of this treaty through Congress, lest anyone bother to take the time to read it. That may not go so well for him. Just as naturally, there’s a movement underway on the Net to stop it.

Trademark police puppets

In light of the TPP, it’s instructive to look back at the DMCA and the damage it has wrought. For example, the lawsuits between the Hollywood studios and file-hosting service Hotfile tell you everything you need to know about the DMCA’s one-sidedness, not to mention the collusion between the content cartel and government.

TorrentFreak reports that Warner Bros. not only deliberately sent bogus takedown notices under the DMCA to Hotfile — agreeing under penalty of perjury that it was the rightful owner of the content it asked to be removed — the studio recently told a court it did not technically lie or violate the law in any way.

[Hotfile] alleged that after giving Warner access to its systems the studio wrongfully took down hundreds of files including demos and Open Source software without holding the copyrights to them. The takedowns continued even after the movie studio was repeatedly notified about the false claims.

While Warner later admitted the accusations, the movie studio argues that they are not to blame because the mistakes were made by a computer, not a person. As a result, the false takedown request were not “deliberate lies.”

However, not all false takedowns were unintentional. Warner admitted that one of their employees deleted Open Source software from Hotfile on purpose. Their rationale for this was that the software in question could have speeded up infringing downloads.

Hotfile countersued Warner, noting the bogus takedown notices and accusing it of committing perjury. But as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes:

On the legal analysis, Warner Bros. may actually be correct here — but it only serves to highlight how weak and ineffectual the DMCA 512(f) is, in that it’s basically impossible to punish anyone who ever takes down legitimate content with a bogus takedown.

There you have it: one set of laws for the copyright cartel, another set for the rest of us. This is what happens when you have a Congress perfectly willing to allow industries to write their laws for it.

Total piracy pinheads

In the case of TPP, U.S. government negotiators — with, it seems, a sizable amount of input from Hollywood and Big Pharma — appear to be steering the bus. Or more accurately, they’re trying to sneak the bus into the garage before anyone notices.

But now that the treaty’s secrets are public, it’ll be a much tougher case to make. Susan Sell, professor of political science at George Washington University, writes in the Washington Post:

It appears that the U.S. administration is negotiating for intellectual property provisions that it knows it could not achieve through an open democratic process…. Congress has already expressed displeasure at being shut out of this process. When its members see how provisions that had been defeated in a domestic, democratic, and deliberative process in January 2012 have been included in TPP I suspect that they will not be happy.

If TPP does somehow pass, the rest of us won’t be happy either.