Europe Worries U.S. Bowing to ‘Industry’ in ACTA Talks

Source: David Kravets, Wired, November 30, 2009

"The European Union is alarmed the Obama administration is lobbying on behalf of the entertainment industry as part of the United States’ negotiations for an new international copyright accord, according to a leaked EU document.

The document, entitled European Union’s Comments to the US Proposal, suggests that the administration, in its closed-door negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement, might have forgotten that copyright interests extend beyond industry concerns.

The “most important provision” of the U.S.-proposed copyright section, according to the EU document, includes language noting that the United States’ “overarching objective” is to “facilitate the continued development of industry.” (.pdf)"

Comment: I suspect that the root of this controversy is the love of money, and different governments seeking an agreement that maximizes the income of their media industries. The situation is also complicated by fundamental differences in copyright philosophy:

• The European nations tend to emphasize natural rights as the basis for copyright -- that the author or creator of a work has a right to appropriate and enjoy part of the benefits that others accrue from his/her work.
• The United States tends to emphasize a utilitarian approach, seeking copyright protection that maximizes utility (within the United States) generated by the creative process.

Of course it is hard to measure the benefit that consumers realize from copyrighted products while the profits of media giants are quite visible. Of course, consumers are poorly organized to defend their interests, as indeed are the potential creators of new works that might be copyrighted, while the media giants are strongly organized to lobby legislative bodies.

So too, rights based approaches have difficulties balancing the natural rights of the creators with the rights of investors to profit from their investments, the rights of the consumers of creative products to free and affordable access to those products, and the rights of society as a whole to high levels of creativity.

I hope that the Nobel Prize given to Elinor Ostrom for her work on The Commons, and the work of others showing how common property approaches can increase creativity will be recognized.

Wired and the blogosphere are means of expression of opinion of a public that might be in opposition to those of industry.

Legislators take notice: my long-term representative to the Congress lost the last election in large part because he seemed to represent media interests rather than those of his constituency on Internet law! JAD