[governance] Russia proposes work at WIPO on censoring the Internet and intermediary liability

[Nick Ashton-Hart]

Dear list subscribers,

At the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement  on Thursday of this past week, the Russian Federation proposed that part of the work of the committee going forward should be in looking at intermediary liability in copyright. At the very end of their intervention, they made clear that what they really want (as one of the outcomes) is  'how governments can regulate relationships between stakeholders disseminating information on the Internet.'

The written part of their proposal conveniently excludes this bombshell - it is as follows:

The Federal Service for Intellectual Property (ROSPATENT) proposes the following issues for future consideration:
Online infringement of copyright and measures to combat it, especially when it comes to cross-border cases of infringement;
The impact of enforcement mechanisms adjusted in other countries in order to tackle piracy, especially in the field of P2P technologies;
Infringement of exclusive rights on objects of intellectual property in the Internet, in particular, problem of control of “parallel import”.
Their intervention was pretty extreme - Matthias managed to get it down pretty completely - see the bottom of this note. 

As soon as they were done IFPI (the major record label association) spoke up to "welcome the Russian proposal" and noted that ensuring intermediaries became more active in fighting piracy was one of its main issues. the IVF (international video federation) then said 'We would like to take up the Russian proposal on copyright - have an inclusive discussion and discuss the importance of intermediaries' responsibility in this field. The ACE is a useful forum to discuss these issues and exchange experiences. ' and proposed a information session be held with a variety of stakeholders at the next meeting.

Matthias and I, as CCIA's delegates, went into high gear talking to delegations, asking them to say something opposing this blatant attempt to use enforcement as a mechanism for state censorship of the Internet. A number of NGOs (Public Knowledge, CIS, Third World Network, and KEI) spoke up defending the Internet and free expression, but the only governments that did were the Brazilians and the Pakistanis.

I am sure that the Russians are very well aware that the traditional allies of keeping the Internet open in the West are also often very pro-enforcement of intellectual property, and that this will make it harder for them to oppose this Russian initiative. 

If the US and other traditional supporters of the Internet give mixed messages on this (as Sec. Clinton basically did at a recent speech which dealt with IP and the Internet), they will be fighting proposals like this one with one hand tied behind their back. The traditional allies of the ICT sector and the public interest on Internet issues at WIPO are from the same countries who either censor the Internet themselves (Pakistan) and/or are (like Brazil and India) proposing government control of the Internet in other fora.

It is not clear what will happen next with this proposal - the committee has a pretty long list of subjects to address  - but we will follow this closely. 

WIPO has been pushing for intermediary liability discussions in copyright and trademarks for some time. All of you who support keeping state control of the Internet under control should be concerned about the activities of this agency. It is very well-funded through patent and trademark registration fees (more than 90% of its budget of more than 300 million Swiss francs a year is from these sources). 

Summary of Russian intervention:

According to some of the studies included in doc ACE 7/5), infringing content is responsible for more than 1/4 of online traffic. While some of Dr. Cliff's (Chatham House) critisism of those numbers legitimate, it remains an important problem, especially "torrent trackers". Law enforcement agencies in Russia identify between 6000 - 7000 illegal file sharing sites each year and it has become a game of whack-a-mole as new services sprout up on a daily basis. This situation is difficult both for rightsholders and consumers because there are too many of those services to be able to track them and they shift their servers constantly. There are roughly 30'000 trackers and only a few of them have been closed because there are international private law and other judicial problems, and so far, no effective mechanism to solve problem has been identified and it remains difficult to build cooperation between states on those issues. This is why the Russian delegation proposes to undertake a series of studies to determine the extent of the problem, look at existing models to fight illegal file sharing, the different practices among member States to prosecute "torrent trackers". To get achieve those objectives, we need to to compare statistics of online crime in different jurisdictions, the number of prosecutions on those issues in different member States etc. One of the outcomes of this study should give us an idea of 'how Governments can regulate the relationships between stakeholders disseminating information over the Internet.'
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20111204/b736228b/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t