[Advocacy Advisors] Civil Society Coalition opposes Copyright Term extension via TPP

[Mathias Schindler]

https://www.eff.org/files/2014/07/08/copyrightterm_tppletter_print-fnl.pdf
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/dozens-organizations-and-businesses-protest-tpp-copyright-proposals

We Join Dozens of Organizations and Businesses to Protest TPP
Copyright Proposals

Today, EFF and its partners in the global Our Fair Deal coalition join
together with an even more diverse international network of creators,
innovators, start-ups, educators, libraries, archives and users to
release two new open letters to negotiators of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP).

The TPP, although characterized as a free trade agreement, is actually
far broader in its intended scope. Amongst many changes to which it
could require the twelve negotiating countries to agree are a slate of
increased rights and privileges for copyright rights holders.

With no official means of participating in the negotiations, the
global community of users and innovators who will be affected by these
proposed changes have been limited to expressing their concerns
through open letters to their political representatives and to the
officials negotiating the agreement.

Each of the two open letters released today focuses on a separate
element of the heightened copyright regime that the TPP threatens to
introduce, and is endorsed by a separate groups of signatories
representing those most deeply impacted by the proposed changes in
each case.

Intermediary Copyright Enforcement

As the document below describes, countries around the Pacific rim are
being pressured to agree to proposed text for the TPP that would
require them to adopt a facsimile of the DMCAto regulate the take-down
of material hosted online, upon the mere allegation of copyright
infringement by a claimed rights-holder. Indeed, industry lobbyists
are pushing for an even stricter regime, dubbed "notice and staydown",
that would make it harder than ever before for users and innovators to
safely publish creative, transformational content online.

Read the full letter here

Amongst the 65 high-profile signatories who have endorsed this open
letter as of today areReddit, the Internet Archive, Stack Exchange and
Namecheap.

Copyright Term Extension

The rash 20 year extension of the term of copyright protection in the
United States in 1998 confounded economists, and frustrated
librarians, archivists and consumers, who were consequently starved of
new public domain works until 2019. Now the USA intends to compound
its error by extending it to all of the other TPP negotiating
countries—or at least, those that haven't already yielded to bilateral
pressure to extend their copyright terms. As the letter below
explains, this would be a senseless assault on the public domain and
on those libraries, authors, educators, users and others who depend
upon it.

Read the full letter here

The letter on copyright term extension has been endorsed by 35
organizations so far, including Creative Commons, the Wikimedia
Foundation, Public Knowledge and theInternational Federation of
Library Associations (IFLA).

Express your support

Although the letters have been presented to TPP negotiators today,
they will remain open for further signatories to express their
support, and may be presented again in future rounds. Interested
organizations can express their interest in endorsing the open letters
on copyright term extension and intermediary liability using the links
given here.

For individuals who are not affiliated with a company or organization,
we encourage them instead to take action through the Our Fair Deal
coalition's petition (can we take it to 20,000 signatories by this
weekend?), and for those who are American citizens, through EFF's
action to oppose fast-track authority.


-- 
Mathias Schindler
Projektmanager
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
web: http://www.wikimedia.de
mail: mathias.schindler at wikimedia.de

Ceterum censeo opera officiales esse liberandam -
http://urheberrecht.wikimedia.de/

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