cleaving is believing

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) was released today. The release follows simmering controversy over the secretive discussions. Earlier drafts and country positions had been intermittently leaked. This is the first official release. It contains the full text, but it lacks the each country’s stated positions.

The decision to release the text emerged in response to “the dramatic 633 to 13 vote in the European Parliament, that demanded the text be published,” according to James Love, Director, KEI. Many of the arguments enumerated in the debate drew from the July 22, 2009 letter to the USTR signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Essential Action, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Public Knowledge, Salud y Fãrmacos, Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), and US PIRG.

The controversy has ranged from the contents of the proposed agreement to the manner by which it might be fulfilled. Lawrence Lessig and Jack Goldsmith, professors of law at Harvard, criticized both in an editorial in the Washington Post on 25 March 2010. The proposed agreement that had been leaked at the time reflected innovations that were not covered by US law and would preempt existing communications and intellectual property laws and enforcement. Lessig and Goldsmith argue that it would not only dramatically change many of these laws, but should the ACTA draft be passed by Obama, it would set a dangerous precedent for the expansion of presidential authority into the legislative branch.

The Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), a consumer-oriented trade advisory board to the US government and European Union, will hold an open discussion of the text on April 28th at the US Department of Commerce. The TACD membership includes 79 US and EU consumer organizations, as well as observer members from Canada and Australia. The organization aims to promote EU and US consumer interests in the context of EU and US political negotiations and agreements, and they have been very active on ACTA, as well as issues such as net neutrality.

In most cases young people think very much the same as older people when it comes to online. Many of the mistakes that young people make are the mistakes older people make. The information young people share on Facebook, for example, is very similar to the amount of information shared on dating sites by adults…I’m worried that they will have tattoos that they will want to get rid of 20 years from now, in the form of digital posts.

—John Palfrey, Harvard Law, commenting on a recent paper on privacy that reviewed data collected in studies of children and teens online from the 1990s through this year: via WSJ. He would go on to say, “I think we need to think very carefully about commercialization of the youth experience. We need to think about the amount of surveillance that is occurring of youth activities, whether by companies or by parents or schools.”

It’s fair to say that my own thinking has recently turned a corner, and I am becoming more and more confident that the economy is on the right track

—Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: via Bloomberg, April 15 speech.

Legal textualism, a view from Geoffrey Stone, professor at the University of Cicago: via, NYT

The Internet is only a means of communication. It is not an amorphous extraterrestrial body with an entitlement to norms that run counter to the fundamental principles of human rights. There is nothing in the criminal or civil law which legalizes that which is otherwise illegal simply because the transaction takes place over the Internet.

—Judge Peter Charleton, Ireland, in his ruling against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s suit of Eircom, which entered an agreement with the music industry to suspend data connections if digital pirates ignore repeated warnings to cease unauthorized copying of music: via, NYT