Copycat Treatment Of A Copyright Treaty

Something's rotten with US negotiations over a world copyright and anti-counterfeit treaty. The Bush administration kept the proceedings very quiet.

That's nothing compared to the Obama administration however: they have classified the nearly all of the treaty documents as national security secrets.

Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage."

Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Love had written in his original request on January 31--submitted soon after Obama's inauguration--that the documents "are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure."

Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

In other words, it's looking like the Obama administration could be making moves to forge an international agreement that could lead to international criminal sanctions against file sharing.

More importantly, why can't Obama tell the people of the US about an international treaty being negotiated in their name? What the hell happened to openness and sunshine laws?

Seems to me in several key respects that Obama is no different from Bush. Far too many Bush administration policies are being carried over by Obama, strengthened, and made all but permanent. It's sickening and disturbing, not to mention illegal and immoral for the same reasons Bush's legal hanky-panky was.

Obama's refusal to shed these horrible policies is going to cost him dearly (not to mention cost us dearly) down the road.