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

[Luis Villa]

As the EFF blog post notes, and as I mentioned in my email over the
weekend, we're signed on to the copyright note. We'll have a blog post up
in the next 3-5 hours, probably.

Luis


On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Mathias Schindler <
mathias.schindler at wikimedia.de> wrote:

> 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/
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.
> V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts
> Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig
> anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
> Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Advocacy_Advisors mailing list
> Advocacy_Advisors at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy_advisors
>



-- 
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

*This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have
received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical
reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/advocacy_advisors/attachments/20140709/bf735ea0/attachment.html>