Get you ACTA text, right here!

I'm editing one of my dissertation case studies so I don't have time to look at it right now, but, for your reading pleasure, here's a leaked copy of the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), dated January 18 (h/t Geist).

Personally, I'm looking forward to never again writing the words "may contain" when talking about the ACTA.

Enjoy!

Everyone’s a Keynesian during a snowfall

From the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon, visual evidence of how China is applying at least part of John Maynard Keynes’ advice about using government spending to stimulate the economy in a recession.

Says Keynes in the General Theory:

“To dig holes in the ground,” paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends.

Says Mark:

Because you wouldn't believe me if I said 10 people were shovelling a small play structure (it's snowing again in Beijing)

Globe and Mail: Almost understanding teh Interwebs (progress!)

Credit where credit is due: After complaining a few weeks ago about Michael Valpy’s confusing story in the Globe and Mail on the political effects of Facebook, it’s nice to see Ivor Tossell’s spot-on critique of why Prime Minister Stephen Harper answering a few questions on YouTube is “not the future of democratic engagement” or “the evolution of social media,” no matter what the PMO says.

Too bad it’s paired with Roy MacGregor’s column, which is hugely enjoyable for its remarkable lack of self-awareness. His big concern is that, online:

what has come to matter more than anything else is the number of hits a certain story receives. The more hits means, in most cases, the larger the audience, and while reaching more readers and viewers is a good thing on one level, it is also a concern for those who believe journalism is about content and information more than reaction.

The potential result? A zero-sum, dystopian world in which quality journalism is strangled by the hobgoblins of celebrity gossip and partisan opinion masquerading as news. Because there's no way that both can exist together online.

He singles out the tendency of online writers to use “hot button” words in headlines or far up in the story (maybe in the first paragraph!) in order to attract readers.

Imagine that: publishers, editors and writers choosing stories, many of dubious social value, in which they think people are interested, and then packaging those stories and writing headlines in such a way as to grab potential readers’ attention.

Readers are invited to explain how this is any different from, I don't know, the workings of any general-interest newspaper ever.

(h/t: Susan Delacourt for pointing out the two columns.)

ACTA: History repeating itself?

So the European Parliament has voted 663-13 against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (h/t BoingBoing). Could this be a turning point in the negotiations? The whole situation does seem to have some similarities to the French reticence that sunk the Multilateral Agreement on Investment over a decade ago. It’s interesting to note, however, that rather than calling for the cessation of negotiations, the European Parliament is calling for the agreement to respect existing EU law. Which means that we’ll probably end up with an ACTA, though (if the vote is effective in putting pressure on EU negotiators) one that's more modest and balanced than what U.S.-based interests have been hoping for.

Here’s a question I’ve been wondering about: if, as I’ve suggested previously, powerful interests will have to be served regardless of what’s in the final text, will ACTA's excessive secrecy have helped or hindered the interests of those countries and interests seeking much stronger copyright laws and enforcement?

On the upside, if you can pull it off, you have an agreement that proponents can use to legitimize changes in domestic law and regulations. And even if you can’t keep it completely secret, the process may put opponents at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation and implementation.

On the downside, excessive secrecy allows opponents to question its legitimacy while letting people’s imaginations run wild about what could be in the treaty and whip up anti-ACTA support. One would imagine that this would be a not-insignificant political problem, even in the case of executive agreements (like ACTA) that do not require parliamentary approval and some of whose requirements may be implemented via regulation, not legislation. And, of course, there’s the whole democratic-governments-should-act-transparently-in-the-interests-of-their-voters thing and the nobody-likes-to-think-they're-being-played thing.

Just some thoughts. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. To say the least.

ACTA: All Global Treaties are Local

A nice reminder, courtesy of Michael Geist , that the battle over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is going to get messier the more that groups directly affected by but excluded from the talks are heard and, most importantly, are listened to.

From Mexico: President of the Senate Commission on Science and Technology, Senator Francisco Javier Castellón Fonseca, is calling for increased transparency in ACTA talks in order to understand their potential impact on digital copyright issues generally and Internet Service Providers specifically.

This is important for three reasons.

1. Politically, Senator Castellón Fonseca, represents the left-leaning PRD, which can be expected to champion individuals’ user rights. The PRD has 127 out of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 26 out of 129 Senate seats. In Mexico currently there are no organized consumer or users’ groups dealing with copyright issues; with a political champion, this could change, making ACTA implementation (to say nothing of other copyright reforms) more difficult.

2. Mexico may also be starting to consider the economic and technological effects of copyright, rather than simply its cultural aspects. The same Senator made remarks to this effect in 2008.

3. The Senate Commission on Science and Technology is responsible for ISP-related issues, and ISPs have a lot of clout in Mexican politics: Telmex has a virtual monopoly on Mexican Internet access and is owned by Carlos Slim, the third-richest man in the world, according to Forbes.

Simply put, so far as Internet access issues are concerned, all roads to Mexican copyright reform and ACTA implementation run through Telmex. That Mexican ISPs and the content businesses and groups have been trying unsuccessfully for a couple of years now to come to an agreement on ISP liability (Mexico currently has no laws dealing with this issue) tells me that Telmex’s interests do not align directly with those of the copyright owners that have been behind the treaty.

In a sense, it might not matter much for Mexico what the ACTA requires: if it doesn’t make Telmex happy, then implementation will be a long, long time coming. Negotiating a treaty in secret may help get something signed, but if powerful interests are not listened to, they will, in the end, make themselves heard.

News flash: Canadian broadband great, says paper owned by ISP

I thought there was something off in the story in the Globe and Mail (a division of CTV Globemedia, owned in part by the same company that owns Sympatico) by Leonard Waverman and Kalyan Dasgupta about how Canadian broadband access isn’t as terrible relative to the rest of the world as OECD data and a recent U.S. Federal Communications Commission report makes it seem. (Yochai Benkler, the report's author, rebutted some of the criticisms four months ago.)

I’ve been looking at the same data they criticize. Yesterday, I finished a rough draft of my case study on the Mexican implementation of the WIPO Internet treaties. When I asked Mexican copyright experts (lawyers, government, industry folks) why the treaties had not yet been implemented fully, everyone pointed to low Internet penetration rates as being one of the main causes. Unauthorized downloads aren’t much of a problem when people aren’t online. It’s only been in the last couple of years, as Mexican Internet penetration rates have started to rise that groups like the International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA), a U.S.-based lobby group, have really begun to push for measures to combat unauthorized downloading (compare the language on “Internet piracy” in their 2009 and 2010 Mexico-related Special 301 filings with those of previous years).

Anyway. One of their first criticisms is that the data conflate household and business access, and when you include business broadband access, Canada fares much better, since proportionately more Canadians are employed by big businesses than elsewhere in the world.

I was pretty sure that the data I looked at didn’t do that. And, unfortunately for their argument, the OECD data actually don’t make such an elementary mistake. As Benkler and an eagle-eyed Globe commentator points out that the OECD actually does report a broadband access rate by household. And by that measure, as our intrepid commentator (Atreya) remarks, Canada is 7th and the U.S. 17th out of the 30 OECD countries (Mexico is in 29th place, just ahead of Turkey).

Last time I checked, ranking 7th in anything isn’t enough to let you brag that you’re leading the pack. Atreya also makes some good points about measuring download speeds, which I’ll leave to the experts to quibble about.

I’d add only two things.

1. Conflict of interest. Given that the Globe and Mail is owned in part by Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), which also controls Bell Canada, which runs Sympatico, one of Canada’s two main Internet Service Providers, it’s shocking that this story ran without any kind of warning about the Globe’s conflict of interest. Absolutely shameful.

2. Where are the links? Since I’ve started writing this blog, I’ve been noticing how Canadian newspapers like the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star often don’t link to the reports and articles they cite. Even with columnists and reporters I trust, I want to verify what they’re talking about for myself. We’re far past the time when a newspaper could confer authority and legitimacy over everything in its pages by its name alone.

And when someone like me is able to find, in five minutes, a link to a four-month-old posting in which the author of the offending report rebuts the allegations put forward in this article (h/t Geist) and yet is not mentioned at all by the authors, it does nothing for the paper's credibility. And, no, calling it an opinion piece doesn't exempt the paper, editors and publishers from their journalistic responsibilities.

Note to publishers: these days, not linking to the documents you’re writing about is like writing an academic paper without providing footnotes.

It’s almost as if these companies don’t want to survive the transition to digitally delivered news.