Martin Pool's blog

Mail me RSS Bazaar distcc Canonical is hiring! flickr

USFTA Senate Committee submission on copyright

Rusty testified to the Senate Select Committee on the US-Aus Free Trade Agreemenet Monday, and I think made a very good presentation of the case. I was happy to be able to help a little in preparing for the presentation.

There are two major problems. Briefly put: the treaty requires draconian laws against devices that can be used to circumvent copyright control measures, and secondly it requires Australia to accept software and business-method patents. There is an additional meta-problem that treaties are harder to change than laws, so if we discover that the provisions are too harsh it is hard to correct the mistake. Roger Clarke has an excellent more detailed description of the problems.

Our slides are now available, which may make more sense read in conjunction with the draft transcript of the session. When the draft is confirmed, it may be linked from the committee web page.

Some personal observations on the comittee:

In transcripts of previous hearings some of the witnesses were subject to very robust questioning, focussing more on the person of the witnesses than on the substance of their submissions. We went in fearing questions along the lines of "are you a communist?", but did not encounter any.

I think the diagrams helped in explaining the fairly complex questions about how technical protection measures infringe on the rights of third parties. However, I don't think we presented them very effectively. There is no, as far as I know, a way to project a slideshow, and it might not be appropriate. We had A3 printouts of the diagrams, but since the committeee room was a bit large it may have been hard for some senators to read them. We probably should have also made A4 sets for easier reference.

posted Thu 20 May 2004 in /issues/copyright | link

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.