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US Ignores Unwelcome WTO IP Rulings
Eye Log writes "The United States is a big fan of leaning on other countries to tighten IP and copyright protection, but has a tendency to ignore its own obligations when it doesn't get its way. 'Two ongoing cases illustrate the point. First, the European Union is pushing for the US to change a pair of rules that it calls "long-standing trade irritants." Despite World Trade Organization rulings against it, the US has not yet corrected either case for a period of several years... Apparently, it's easy to get hot and bothered when it's industries from your country that claim to be badly affected by rules elsewhere. When it comes to the claims of other countries, though, even claims that have been validated by the WTO, it's much easier to see the complexity of the situation, to spend years arguing those complexities before judges, and to do nothing even when compelled by rulings.'"
I really don't see the problem. Member nations are autonomous. Any compliance with demands from the World Court, the UN or the WTO is strictly voluntary for any nation. Their real authority is precisely whatever the member nations decide. That's not just for the US-- it's for any member nation of any such organization. Orders from the UN and similar groups really just don't matter unless they can back them up-- and they can't. I prefer it that way, honestly. The UN and WTO are a bit too socialistic for my tastes, but that's just me.
It's nothing new to Canada and our long-standing disputes over softwood lumber and other issues. The US even ignores it's own courts when it doesn't like the rulings.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Pretty much the very group of people for whom this is an anathema are taking the opportunity to complain that the US has not implemented this draconian bullshit because, well, it's fun to say "the US ignores what it doesn't like".
The chuckle factor is definitely high here.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
You might use sarcasm for just one sentence in your comment though; it doesn't make sense to mark the whole thing as the same tone.
The US has more trade agreements with Canada than any other country and in Canada's experience it is absolutely true. The US government's negotiators howl about DRM, our approach to health care, pharmacuticals, gay marriage, drug "leniency" etc, etc while ignoring rluling after ruling not just by the WTO, but by the NAFTA boards, and other committees that supposedly govern bilateral trade. Largely they do it because they can get away with it.
I have no doubt that the US will recover from it's financial woes. The world economy is changing though, and competition for resources is increasing. The US's negotiating position is changing as well. Instead of being the one of a few major buyers of commodities, they are now among many. Ignoring multilateral trade rulings as a routine is going to end as a consequence. At least if the US government is smart about it.
>>Canada dumps lumber in the US at subsidized prices
Well, that would be YOUR point of view. Canada's point of view is different.
That's why we have courts...in this case, the WTO.
And the WTO court found your point of view to not reflect reality, and Canada's point of view to reflect reality much, much better. Repeatedly.
And every time, the US effectively ignored the court ruling. Please, I don't want to start an argument over softwood lumber. I'm just stating the facts: the WTO ruled against the US, and the US did not adjust its behaviour the way they would have insisted on another country doing had another country received the same ruling.
The headline on this story would have been more correct by removing the "IP" from the sentence. "The US ignores unwelcome WTO Rulings" - of every kind. Maybe not ALL of them, but certainly some cases that are matters of much, much journalistic coverage. Many of these cases pre-date the Bush2 administration.
You are missing two things. First, the Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) specifically states that any treaty obligations shall be the law of the land, and so you are legally, according to the constitution, bound by WTO rulings since the WTO powers are granted by a treaty. Secondly, you are ignoring the fact that the USA is expecting US law to extend over most of the world and is attempting to use the WTO to enforce this. Since the principle export of the USA is IP, your economy would be in an even worse state than it is now if the rest of the world took the same attitude the USA does to WTO IP rulings.
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From Article VI:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Technically you don't need an amendment to change the Constitution and the supreme law of the US, all you need is 67 Senators and the President to concoct and agree to a treaty with a foreign power. That treaty then has the same weight as the Constitution.
Retired NJ Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano has written a couple of books which touch on the subject of how the federal government has been able to subvert the Constitution. Check out "Constitutional Chaos" and "The Constitution in Exile"
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
The difference is that the US agreed to follow those rules. If you don't intend to, then you shouldn't have signed the damn treaty in the first place.
Actually, this has next to nothing to do with this or any Administration unilaterally ignoring WTO rulings. The issues raised in the article have to do with laws passed by the Congress of the United States. Without the Congress of the United States repealing those laws, the current (or indeed, any future) Administration has no power to do anything about these WTO rulings.
Ummm, well, actually, under the US constitution, treaties that have been signed by the administration and approved by the Senate are the law of land. Congress has nothing more to say aside from repealing the treaty.
Hello? The EU is so ridiculously hypocritical. Just look at the EU's bananas regime:
http://www.ustr.gov/Document_Library/Press_Releases/2007/June/United_States_Requests_WTO_Panel_to_Review_European_Unions_Banana_Import_Regime.html
The EU has been consistently ruled against for well over a decade, and there is still no movement towards compliance.
Sorry but the Supremes just declared otherwise.
Also I am sure that your paraphrase of that bit of law rather
egregiously misrepresents it.
There are plenty of similar examples from people like the
Americal Family Association and anti-gun lobbyists.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Plus, I thought
So what's your point? Because that's exactly what china does.
URGENT NEWS UPDATE: struggling smaller country stops playing by U.S. rules. Antigua allows pirated software.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The attitude that "rules apply to everyone else but not to us" is the single most distinctive aspect of the current US administration. Torture, the Geneva convention, the world court for prosecuting war crimes, illegal bugging of US citizens, the ABM treaty - and that's just what I can think of in a few seconds.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Care to address the other point the poster made?
If the rest of the world ignored U.S. patents and copyright, then I'm fairly certain the U.S. would care. Same deal with what the U.S. is doing you know - it's not necessarily in the best interest of Europe or any foreign group to follow the laws of the United States.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What's with the style? How about ?
Re-read that passage, it doesn't say what you think it says. SCOTUS can rule a treaty unconstitutional just like any other law, and the Constitutionally dictated solution is to withdraw from the treaty.
That said, the current SCOTUS is full of hacks and ideologues who will support whatever their neo-con cohorts wish regardless of what the Constitution does or does not say. Score one for PNAC.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Sorry but the Supremes just declared otherwise.
That Supreme Court case had to do with whether a treaty signed by the US could be enforced by the president.
Apparently, that particular treaty didn't have any legislation passed by congress backing it up and/or the treaty didn't include say anything about how it would affect the states.
"Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said that because the treaty did not explicitly say its provisions were binding, and because there was no legislation to make the treaty binding, the president could not on his own force the states to comply." From here.
It's a real pity that no one, not even the WTO or NAFTA actually agrees with this claim. Of course, repeating lies over and over to get your way is a classic example. The reality is that your sawmills basically want to turn Canadian forests into private wood lots, to enforce their own model of forestry on a sovereign state.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually.... In the US BMI collects royalties from every place that plays music in a money making environment.
The only way around this is if every song played is live, and by the person that wrote it.
Regards, Jack
Judging from the article linked from the comment above, in the softwood case in question, the WTO backed the US, and NAFTA was the international body which supported the Canadian position.
Either you and lots of mods are dreamin', or you're talking about a different trade conflict with Canada...
First, the softwood lumber situation had been settled for a couple of years now.
My ass it has. Canada was never repaid a good chunk of the money that was collected in penalties by the US. Settled by US standards maybe.
with the WTO itself. There are good reasons why no sane country should cede control over trade to the WTO. One should remember that the WTO concerns itself ONLY with trade. It doesn't give a crap about anything else. Environment? No. Working conditions? No. Human/political rights? No.
Removing trade as a tool in diplomacy severely limits a country's options to respond to another country's actions with which it may disagree. Developing {bi,multi}-lateral treaties may be more work and take longer but is much more flexible.
WTO? Just say NO.
Remind me to send them a thank you letter. If you would have said Brazilian meat then I would have conceded a point.
I would rather eat raw Swedish chicken than to touch American beef.
Couldn't find any numbers regarding beef but look at the ammount of salmonella in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmonellosis#Incidents_of_salmonellosis, 16% of the chickens had salmonella compared with Sweden where 1% of all the animals got it http://www.smittskyddsinstitutet.se/sjukdomar/salmonellainfektion/, the stats are from the Swedish CDC, unfortunatly I couldn't find the numbers in english on the site.
In Sweden when ever salmonella is discovered the whole shipment of food is destroyed and if salmonella is found at a farm then all animals are destroyed.
"This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (or STFU, for you un-hip people)."
There were quite a large number of people in the US that didn't want the US to join the WTO, complete with rallies and protests.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
This isn't about fairness - failure to abide by WTO judgments certainly represents treaty violation and, by definition, infringes upon international law.
Oh NOES! Anything but international law violations, what is Hans Blix going to write a sternly worded letter now? Sarcasm off, international law without an effective enforcement mechanism is little more than a helpful suggestion.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Dare I use the word fascist?
Well, you should. People have been "Godwined" out of calling American fascism what it is for far too long. Any time anyone dares to point out that the current state of the US government, with its collusion between corporate and political interests, is turning into the very definition of fascism, they're greeted with howls of righteous fury and snide comments like, "When we start rounding up all the Jews and throwing them in death camps, let us know." But fascism is essentially an economic philosophy, not a racial or religious one; the anti-Semitism that went along with the German variety was pretty much absent in Italy, where fascism was invented and named.
The funny thing is that the same right-wingers who mock people who call American fascism by its proper name are very quick to label their political opponents "Communists" or "Marxists," even though no mainstream American politician, no matter how leftist, has ever come close to proposing anything like true Communism or even socialism. (People who think the New Deal and its sequelae are socialist have no clue what they're talking about.) But the "moderate" policies praised by centrist Democrats and Republicans alike are straight out of Mussolini's playbook.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This just in government does what is in it's best interest ... Notice how generic the use of the word "government" is. As in, A government... as in any government
The other parties to the treaty may still expect that the United States lives up to treaties it has ratified, even if the government never had the grant of power to enforce treaty obligations in the first place. But the Congress can't, through a treaty, give the Federal Government any power that "We the People" have not already granted to it in the Constitution.
The WTO treaty at issue here was explicitly written to be non-self executing, was agreed by all parties to be non-self executing, provides no enforcement mechanism, and hence requires Congress to pass laws to enforce the provisions, as they've done in many cases. In some cases, Congress has chosen not to do so, or has explicitly chosen to pass laws contrary to treaty obligations. There isn't a thing that this or any other Administration can do to enforce the WTO ruling in the cases mentioned in the article
When we signed onto the WTO, granted it was a bunch of democrats in control (1995), it was understood that limitations of a government provided a best effort. What the WTO panel has done is ignore that principle and make a rulling that was abstract to it. They changed the rules midstream. But you see, that's the bitch of the situation. Currently no other US company can can engage in interstate gambling which is the what is banned. Each and every gambling franchise needs to set a local point of business in each state and follow the rules of that state. Any foreign company is free to do the same. There is no discrimination going on here. What the WTO did was say your sovereignty and the sovereignty of the individual states doesn't matter and the limits of power your government body has doesn't matter.
(and yes, each and every state enjoys an amount of sovereignty which is the way the constitution- the only way the federal government gets it's power, set it up. We are the United "States" of America. A "state" is a country in every other context.) Well, no. It is piracy. The WTO has no power over WIPO treaties and has no power whatsoever to take property from citizens of any country. The WTO has overstepped it's bounds in what should be considered an act of war of Antigua chooses to act on it.
An embargo would more or less be a response to a threat. What will most likely happen is something similar to Cuba where the US hassles companies doing business with them and makes it illegal to do business with the country. Any exports containing pirated works will probably be confiscated and so on. And that won't be illegal because the WTO doesn't not have any power or provisions to enact concessions over private property or violate other treaties in place. The power to do so just isn't in any of the treaties signed or currently in effect that fall under the WTO umbrella.
"treaties" with any country. And yes, it is important to call it a treaty and not a contract. Calling it a contract allows you to make the mistakes of not treating it as a treaty and taking the wrong context. I don't know if your purposely doing that or if you are doing it without knowing.
BTW, a treaty is not a contract. A contract is not a treaty. They share similar attributes but aren't the same thing. And even with a contract, there are limits to what you can negotiate away within a legal framework so even then is isn't as cut and dry as you want. Lol.. You are erring on the side of ignorance. Good faith does not, I repeat does not mean that all obligations will be satisfied. It means that an honest attempt at satisfying them will proceed. When natural and legal roadblocks prevent obligations from being satisfied, it is still Pacta sunt servanda because a party can only enter to the respect of the power they have or control. This is especially true in treaties peremptory norm is a fundemental process. There are very few new countries where you don't know the limitations of power a governing body has. With 200 or more years of experience no one entering the a treaty with the US should be unaware of any limitations on the powers of the government. If anything, Caveat emptor wouldbe the quote you are looking for. Like I said, this isn't the first time this has happened and it isn't only with the US.
A treaty carries under a different set of laws then a contract. While they are similar in most respects, you can't goto a superior court to settle disputes with the laws of just one country. A treaty is different then just a contract.