International Copyright Policy Laundering and the Ongoing War on Access to Knowledge | Electronic Frontier Foundation

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-10-23

Summary:

"How is it possible that someone could face years in prison for sharing an academic paper online? How did we arrive at such extreme criminal punishments for accessing knowledge and information? Well, this has been long in the making. We got here because Big Content interests have dominated secretive, back-room copyright negotiations over several decades, resulting in laws that are increasingly restricting our speech, and our ability to comment, control, re-use, and access knowledge, culture, and the devices that we own. This is especially relevant for Open Access Week, which is all about making publicly-funded information and knowledge available free of licensing restrictions. Although some forward-thinking governments and publishers are helping to realize this dream, in a majority of cases the full force of copyright law still applies to constrain access to knowledge, with dire consequences for those like Diego Gomez. The Colombian law that is being used to prosecute Diego for sharing an article online was passed following the conclusion of the US trade agreement with Colombia completed in 2006. The law was designed to fulfill the trade agreement's restrictive copyright standards, and it expanded criminal penalties for copyright infringement—increasing possible prison sentences and monetary fines. Although we have not seen a case like Diego's before, such extreme criminal provisions are not unique to Colombia, nor are the provisions in the trade agreement they signed with the US. There are close to a dozen bilateral US trade deals that contain copyright provisions that echo US law. For the most part though, they are actually worse because they do not contain many of the public interest protections that are built into US law, such as fair use ..."

Link:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/open-access-week-international-copyright-policy-laundering-and-ongoing-war-access

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.fair_use oa.litigation oa.colombia oa.south oa.libre

Date tagged:

10/23/2014, 10:09

Date published:

10/23/2014, 06:09