ReasonedResponse.com

Imagine a world in which our government secretly conspired with seven other countries to write new laws that would create sweeping new police powers, turn Internet Service Providers into snitches and place millions of American school children at risk -- all to line the pockets of a handful of greedy entertainment moguls.

A movie plot?  A best-selling thriller?  Bizarre fiction?

Nope, just business as usual in the Office of the US Trade Representative, an obscure offshoot of the President's staff in the White House.  For the past five years or so, the Office of the US Trade Representative has been scurrying from country to country, forcing those who want to do trade with the US to also adopt legislation similar to -- or worse than -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that has proven such a miserable failure in the US.

They have done this to appease the entertainment industry in the US, in a blatant political move called "off-shoring legislation."  In off-shoring, you take a really, really bad piece of legislation that you can't get the Congress to agree to here in the US, and take it overseas.  There, you use the power of the US government to bludgeon other governments to adopt the bad legislation we won't -- and then attempt to get the Congress to buy into the bad laws in the name of "normalizing" international agreements.

Examples abound.  When the US Department of Justice was unable to force US Internet Service Providers to save all the data about their customers for two years -- with no guarantees of the security of that data, and no indication of who would pay for all that storage -- they simply off-shored the bad idea to Europe.  There, the EU actually passed such a law, though with considerable resistance from clear-thinking governments.  And two years later, the EU has virtually nothing to show for it except mounting costs to consumers.  Now, Congress is being asked to pass similar laws here to "bring us into alignment with Europe."

In the US, the entertainment industries have been successful in pushing for and getting some truly bad copyright laws, including a Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows the Recording Industry Association of America to sue millions of school kids, grandmothers who don't own computers and dead people.  Really.  I'm not making this stuff up.

But unsatisfied with their dismal performance in the US, the entertainment industries lobbied to get the Office of the US Trade Represetnative to shove our bad copyright laws down the throats of all of our business partners, whether they needed it or not (Australia, for example, has its own copyright laws, but was forced to accept DMCA-style provisions in order to get the US to finalize the most recent trade agreement).  Singapore.  Brazil.  Australia.  Vietnam.  You name the country, and we've blackmailed them into adopting our bad laws in order to enrich a handful of entertainment companies.

But that wasn't enough.

So in 2008, the United States Government initiated secret talks with the other countries involved in the G8 summit for this year, with an eye toward forcing a new global copyright agreement.  Called ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, this new initiative would, according to drafts leaked from the discussions, criminalize even the most minor copyright infractions, force taxpayers to bear the cost of copyright infrigement investigations, access the information of consumers without a warrant, and force ISPs to spy on their customers in search of copyright infractions.  There are great write-ups on ACTA on Wikipedia, and some excellent documents on WikiLeaks.

Just to be clear here, I don't like the idea of people stealing copyrighted materials.  And if the US government wants to conduct some negotiations in secret, I can understand.  National security and all that.  That's not my issue, though the EFF clearly feels diffrently, as do the hundreds of political and Internet leaders worldwide who have risen up in indignation over ACTA.

My issue is this: since when did the US government decide its laws were superior to that of other nations -- particualrly laws that have proven less than effective here in the US?  And when did we decide that lining the pockets of entertainment moguls is a more noble national goal that maintaining the integrity of the Internet?

ACTA has been designed without benefit of input from anyone other than bureaucrats and copyright lawyers.  It has been done in secret not to protect the integrity of the negotion process, but rather to shield the negotiations from those who would recognize them for the travesty they are.  And it is particularly galling that this is being pushed -- and pushed hard -- not by some third-world dictatorship or cabal of anti-American interests but rather by our own government as an extension of our official policy.

ACTA represents an act of bad faith on the part of the United States government.  An act of bad faith toward the broadband industry, toward consumers, toward the civil liberties guarnateed in our Constitution, toward our trading partners and toward countries unable to protect themselves from predatory bureaucrats and their bad ideas.