Slashdot Mirror
WIPO Music Control Treaty Ratified
Greyfox writes: "Here's one that slipped through the cracks. The WIPO (You know, that unelected, unaccountable organization that lives in the Corporate back pockets) has ratified a anti-music piracy treaty which will go into effect on May 20. It apparently has anti-circumvention measures similar to the DMCA and will carry the force of law in the USA and other member countries." We had a more informative story about these two treaties a few months ago. The only new information is that the Phonograms and Performances Treaty now has enough signatures to go into effect in May.
Your argument is missing some distinctions.
First, "countries" are not atomic entities. There are interest groups within them. The RIAA/MPAA + media giants have their allies within many of the signatory countries. They would like nothing more than to control content and the means of distributing content completely. They would also like to control prices, limit competition, and some guranteed income in the form of hardware taxes.
These groups have the advantage of money and organization, but the disadvanatge that many of them live in democratic countries. So to get what they want, they have to do an end run around the democratic process. One way to do this is with economic treaties, which are negotiated in secret, by the very groups who will benefit most from them, and are then passed on to legislatures to be rubber stamped.
Why do the legislatures rubber stamp them? Well, for one thing, the lawmakers tend to be predisposed to favor this stuff in the first place, due to a variety of filters. For instance, in the US, to even be eligable to make a run for congress requires that you raise about $1,000,000/year from wealthy individuals. This means that our representatives are not exactly a "cross-section" of the population. So the lawmakers don't view the public as some group to be served, but as an annoying constituency which should be kept quiet and under control. I'm generalizing here, but the principle is fairly accuarate. In other countries there are other filters, of varying restrictiveness.
Moreover, the media doesn't highlight these amendments. Where was the huge public debate about the Telecommunications Act? Where was the public debate about the DMCA? Why do these agreements slip under the radar? There is little discussion of them in the media -- unless through leaks or lack of control word spreads anyways, and then there is a rush to defend them. So the Nafta debate, which was caused only because Perot -- who can buy his own air time -- forced the issue onto the airwaves. And then there was a rush by the NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. to villify him and to not present the opposing views.
Finally there is the method of bundling, by which these agreements are presented to congress without possibility to amend them, as part of a larger package, for a straight up or down vote. Threats of boycotts, higher tariffs, cutting of loans/aid are big clubs than can be used against other countries to get them to sign. But the key point is that the legislatures generally want to sign these things, and the aforementioned threats are provided as cover for them to say to their citizens -- "we had to do it."
At the end of the day, you end up paying taxes when you buy a hard drive, and the police can arrest you for reverse engineering, even if your goal is to interoperate, or just provide a lower price substitute.
I recommend reading an article about the derailed Multilateral Agreement on Investements to see this dynamic at work. In the case of the MAI, media leaks, mostly on the internet, launched a grassroots effort to oppose the provisions of the MAI. This resulted in derailing the agreement as more and more of the provisions came to light, and public hearings in several countries were called. A brief excerpt:
The [Wall Street] journal goes on to urge that it will be necessary "to drum up business support" so as to beat back the hordes [of people opposed to the MAI]. Until now, business hasn't recognized the severity of the threat. And it is severe indeed. "Veteran trade diplomats" warn that with "growing demands for greater openness and accountability," it is becoming "harder for negotiators to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliaments." "Instead, they face pressure to gain wider popular legitimacy for their actions by explaining and defending them in public," no easy task when the hordes are concerned about "social and economic security," and when the impact of trade agreements "on ordinary people's lives...risks stirring up popular resentment" and "sensitivities over issues such as enviromental and food safety standards." It might even become impossible "to resist demands for direct participation by lobby groups in WTO decisions, which would violate one of the body's central principles": "'This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups,' says a former WTO official."
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Here's an interesting little snipped from Article VI of the US Constitution that most of you probably didn't know about (emphasis mine):
This Constitution... and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.
The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that international treaties hold the same weight as the Constitution. This means that if a WIPO treaty trumps the First Amendment, you're up a creek.
Back in the 1950's there was a bill floating around Congress known as the Bricker Amendment that would have forbade Congress from ratifying a treaty (only requires 2/3 of the Senate) that would require a constituational amendment to do otherwise (which requires 2/3 of both houses and then 2/3 of the states). It didn't pass. Do a Google for more info.
This means that a group of people who we don't have any control over for six years at a time can trump the Constitution whenever 67 of them agree to. (Yet another reason to repeal the 17th, probably.)
There's been a new interest in the Bricker Amendment in recent years from the political right and other groups, but I don't think anything's been really done about it.
BEGIN subtleHint();
Perhaps if we all wrote to our Congresscritters and Senators and bitched about the lack of such a law protecting us from abuses in WIPO and WTO something might get done about it.
END subtleHint();