It's a dumb idea - flawed with millions of different problems and basically lends itself to favouring countries whose majority of national assets are heavily based on intellectual property [hence the reason ACTA was put forward by Japan and USA - the later mainly due to political lobbying]
The reality is - enforcing copyright laws based on one jurisdiction [ala USA] - on every other jurisdiction is a bad idea. Of course, the USA tries to "force" its bilateral and multilateral trade relations with new clauses requiring higher intellectual property standards. This 'stark picture' is already being painted on the 2010 USTR Special Report 301 [basically bad IP enforcement countries - primarily the BRIC [brazil/russia/india/china] block] where not one single African nation is listed on the reports Watch List - WTF ? Yes, why are some of the poorest african nations strongly enforcing IP rights ? You guessed it - trade preferences with the USA.
So yes - it sucks "only within the United States" - but I would rather that than some moron in a USA movie studio office, sipping cognac and lighting up a cigar telling me how my country should run its domestic law [pardon the gross generalization of movie studio executives painted from movie studio produced movies].
But we already have a unified copyright law! The Bern Convention of 1886! If a work is copyrighted in the USA, the it's copyrighted in France. Before this, say, Charles Dicken's work was copyrighted in the UK, but not the USA. We already have global copyright works.
In a way, the global copyright causes problems like this. A TV show like Breaking Bad is copyrighted & shown in the USA, so it's copyrighted in the Netherlands. However the copyright holder doesn't show/sell the show in the Netherlands, so a person there (a) can't watch it, and (b) can't pirate it, since it's copyrighted in their country.
The problem, from the content creators' perspective, is the enforcement of copyright law varies so widely. In some countries it's draconian, in others virtually nonexistent. My impression is ACTA was really introduced to, well, make it draconian everywhere.
I'm not sure how this makes sense for countries that consume more foreign content than they sell locally produced content in foreign markets.
I don't quite follow the reasoning. Wouldn't it make more sense to make legit media consumption easier in countries with lax copyright enforcement and widespread infringement?
Not if they think they can force those countries to tighten enforcement. I think these companies believe if they could just remove all the torrents from the web they'd get a sale for each torrent they stopped, whereas just making legit sales available will only capture a small portion of the potential market.
I seriously doubt that's the case, but it might make sense for them to go this way - the money they spend buying politicians isn't much in the great scheme of things. It might even be cheaper than setting up an efficient worldwide distribution system.
Comments
unifying copyright laws globally has already been tried with ACTA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...]
It's a dumb idea - flawed with millions of different problems and basically lends itself to favouring countries whose majority of national assets are heavily based on intellectual property [hence the reason ACTA was put forward by Japan and USA - the later mainly due to political lobbying]
The reality is - enforcing copyright laws based on one jurisdiction [ala USA] - on every other jurisdiction is a bad idea. Of course, the USA tries to "force" its bilateral and multilateral trade relations with new clauses requiring higher intellectual property standards. This 'stark picture' is already being painted on the 2010 USTR Special Report 301 [basically bad IP enforcement countries - primarily the BRIC [brazil/russia/india/china] block] where not one single African nation is listed on the reports Watch List - WTF ? Yes, why are some of the poorest african nations strongly enforcing IP rights ? You guessed it - trade preferences with the USA.
So yes - it sucks "only within the United States" - but I would rather that than some moron in a USA movie studio office, sipping cognac and lighting up a cigar telling me how my country should run its domestic law [pardon the gross generalization of movie studio executives painted from movie studio produced movies].
No thanks.
But we already have a unified copyright law! The Bern Convention of 1886! If a work is copyrighted in the USA, the it's copyrighted in France. Before this, say, Charles Dicken's work was copyrighted in the UK, but not the USA. We already have global copyright works.
In a way, the global copyright causes problems like this. A TV show like Breaking Bad is copyrighted & shown in the USA, so it's copyrighted in the Netherlands. However the copyright holder doesn't show/sell the show in the Netherlands, so a person there (a) can't watch it, and (b) can't pirate it, since it's copyrighted in their country.
The problem, from the content creators' perspective, is the enforcement of copyright law varies so widely. In some countries it's draconian, in others virtually nonexistent. My impression is ACTA was really introduced to, well, make it draconian everywhere.
I'm not sure how this makes sense for countries that consume more foreign content than they sell locally produced content in foreign markets.
I don't quite follow the reasoning. Wouldn't it make more sense to make legit media consumption easier in countries with lax copyright enforcement and widespread infringement?
Not if they think they can force those countries to tighten enforcement. I think these companies believe if they could just remove all the torrents from the web they'd get a sale for each torrent they stopped, whereas just making legit sales available will only capture a small portion of the potential market.
I seriously doubt that's the case, but it might make sense for them to go this way - the money they spend buying politicians isn't much in the great scheme of things. It might even be cheaper than setting up an efficient worldwide distribution system.
Yes it would — except, apparently, under Hollywood logic.