Just to point out that the EU Parliament has serious concerns about this.
It appears that the EU Commission did the negotiation – the EU PArliament has stated that this is (effectively) ultra vires because the Parliament wasn’t involved, and the discussions closed to any outsiders.
Not only would this outlaw the Internet, it would also outlaw all current web browsers. Whenever you view a web page, the browser downloads a copy of all the elements that are on that page and stores them in the browser cache. The cache is just a folder on your hard drive and the things stored in there are stored as ordinary files (e.g., images may be in there as GIF or JPEG files). It does this so that it doesn’t have to redownload all these items every time the page reloads (which may happen many times in a single user session). Without the cache, browsing the web would be painfully slow. All these files get left there after you finish looking at the page, and even if the browser were to delete them when you’re done, they’re still there while you’re looking at the page. So your web browser has just made an automatic copy of a copyrighted item on your computer, which persists until you choose to clean up the cache. Sounds like IP infringement to me!
[…] David Post at Volokh Conspiracy sounds the alarm over the many bad provisions in a new intellectual property pact, the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,” arrived at through a “truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf.” Margot Kaminski at Balkinization details how the measure if adopted would for the first time criminalize a wide swath of noncommercial personal copying behavior, mandate statutory damages that would grossly over-compensate many rights holders for infringements, and reduce de minimis thresholds under which border officers currently overlook small quantities of infringing material on travelers’ laptops and smartphones. And those are just a few highlights of a long and disturbing list of provisions. Earlier here. […]
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Just to point out that the EU Parliament has serious concerns about this.
It appears that the EU Commission did the negotiation – the EU PArliament has stated that this is (effectively) ultra vires because the Parliament wasn’t involved, and the discussions closed to any outsiders.
Not only would this outlaw the Internet, it would also outlaw all current web browsers. Whenever you view a web page, the browser downloads a copy of all the elements that are on that page and stores them in the browser cache. The cache is just a folder on your hard drive and the things stored in there are stored as ordinary files (e.g., images may be in there as GIF or JPEG files). It does this so that it doesn’t have to redownload all these items every time the page reloads (which may happen many times in a single user session). Without the cache, browsing the web would be painfully slow. All these files get left there after you finish looking at the page, and even if the browser were to delete them when you’re done, they’re still there while you’re looking at the page. So your web browser has just made an automatic copy of a copyrighted item on your computer, which persists until you choose to clean up the cache. Sounds like IP infringement to me!
[…] David Post at Volokh Conspiracy sounds the alarm over the many bad provisions in a new intellectual property pact, the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,” arrived at through a “truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf.” Margot Kaminski at Balkinization details how the measure if adopted would for the first time criminalize a wide swath of noncommercial personal copying behavior, mandate statutory damages that would grossly over-compensate many rights holders for infringements, and reduce de minimis thresholds under which border officers currently overlook small quantities of infringing material on travelers’ laptops and smartphones. And those are just a few highlights of a long and disturbing list of provisions. Earlier here. […]