PPAU Webcast Episode 1

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Hello and welcome to the Pirate Party Australia Webcast, dedicated to the discussion of freedom of information and culture, government transparency and civil liberties in the internet age. I'm Sam Kearns and this is Episode number 1 for Saturday 14th of April, 2012.

This week on the Pirate Party Australia Webcast we begin a four part series on the history of copyright and also talk to Simon Frew, deputy president of Pirate Party Australia about the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.

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On April 5th Pirate Party Australia made a press release expressing disgust at reports that the United States plans to cancel the stakeholder program for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement . Simon Frew, Deputy President of Pirate Party Australia gave a presentation at a stakeholder’s meeting in Melbourne last month, where he criticised the lack of transparency surrounding the TPPA negotiations. I've invited Simon Frew onto the webcast today to tell us more, thanks for joining me Simon.

Simon: Hi, how's it going

Sam: OK to begin with Simon, tell me more about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement itself, what exactly is it?

Simon: Well it was a free trade treaty originally between Chile, Malaysia and a few other small countries, but has since expanded to include Australia, the U.S and a lot more countries that have turned up

Sam: So why do we want to be involved in it, like, is this just one of those things where it's like, because we're allies, y'know, it's just kind of expected?

Simon: I think that's partly it and also partly there are a lot of sort of benefits Australia can get through getting actual free trade treaties, but the problem with the TPPA is that a lot of what the US are pushing for is not the sort of thing you'd get in a traditional free trade treaty, it's more of a wishlist for major corporations particularly corprorations that are interested in intellectual property issues like pharmaceutical companies and the record industry.

Sam: Yeah so it's, I mean, there's a lot of other stuff in the TPPA that's not specifically about copyright and patents and I guess it's just a matter of their trying to slip this in along with everything else

Simon: Yeah a lot of the Australian negotiating positions are actually seen fairly reasonable they want to make qualification more accepted from country to country so people can get jobs, and go to different countries and get jobs easier, and consistent standards for stuff like that.

A lot of what the US is pushing for, even more broadly than IP is pretty much as bad as the IP section, I'm not, I don't know as much about, but it seems to be a lot of stuff like making, if a government passes laws affecting the profitability of a corporation operating in that country they'd have to reimburse that company for the lost profits or projected lost profits. There's stuff like that which U.S has had on the agenda of various free trade agreements for years, so it's not just IP where they're pushing for a lot of terrible stuff, but the IP stuff is particularly bad.

Sam: Yeah so that's pretty worrying, the idea that they could push this idea that we can't pass a law that might possible hinder the profits of a U.S. corporation or else we have to pay, I mean that's kind of like, an end run around sovereignty isn't it?

Simon: Yeah, yeah, it is indeed. It's one of those things where, I think, when the original IP chapter was leaked a lot of people said about that that the U.S. leaked it themselves so they could get something not so extreme but still get what they see as progress on the issues, so it's probably the same with stuff like this as well, where they're arguing from an extreme position so that people will come back from there and they'll still get a lot of what they want.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, I've heard about that kind of thing being done, um what was it? The "daddy, buy me a pony" tactic where the daughter says "daddy, buy me a pony, buy me a pony!" and he says "no" and then she says "will you buy me a dog?" and he says "yes" thinking he's got out of it easily, and the daughter thinks "well that was the easiest dog I ever got".

Simon: Yeah

Sam: So anyway moving on, how does the stakeholder program fit into the TPPA negotiations, I mean who came up with it and what was it supposed to do?

Simon: Uhhm, I'm not entirely sure which countries were really pushing for it but a number of countries involved in the negotiations have pushed for it, there are a few countries that, like particularly the USA but also some of the less democratic countries didn't really want civil society involved in the negotiations but I think Australia has pushed for more involvement which is a good thing, but this was.. the meeting in Melbourne was the first time that civil society has been invited to the negotiations, it seems the last now.

Sam: Yeah you you think the US was ever actually serious about the stake holder program or was this just a token effort from the get go that got canned as soon as it looked like they weren't hearing what they wanted to hear out of it?

Simon: Uhmm, I think they didn't want it at all and they had it as a kind of response to a lot of pressure applied to them from a lot of the other countries involved in the negotiations and it didn't go well for them and that would by why they really pushed to not have anymore. The next round was originally to be held in Chile and now it's moved to the U.S.A. A lot of people think that's just so they can exert more control over the entire process.

Sam: Well that's what I thought of that when you said it. *chuckles* I thought well obviously if it's in the U.S. they can take greater control of it. So what's going to happen going forward now, is the TPPA now just going to be all behind closed doors and freedom of information requests results in redacted documents and things like that?

Simon: Yeah it seems that way. There is a stakeholder meeting alongside the negotiating round in the U.S. but there's no space for presentations and it's unclear exactly what any use would be in going, possible chance to speak to negotiators I suppose, but that's about it really. There's no information of what's actually being negotiated, it's pretty hard to go and comment about it, the treaty.

Sam: All right was there anything else you wanted to say about it?

Simon: We could talk more about some of what they're actually trying to actually to do, with the U.S. one.

Sam: Yeah sure go ahead

Simon: Well a lot of the dodgy stuff in terms of the intellectual property section is sort of two strands of main areas of concern. One's the patents, in particular medicine, where they have basically, they want to clamp down on generic medicines and include provisions for border seizures of any medicines that are suspected of breaking a patent of any of the signatory countries. It would have a massive impact on health in a lot of 3rd world countries, particularly signatory countries, like Vietnam has a large generic medicine industry which they sell cheaply to other poor countries. That would become a lot more difficult industry to run under the agreement.

Sam: Yeah that's definitely one of the area where there's a real moral issue at stake regarding.. Y'know, because if someone's got a patent then that means that completely independent invention is sort of disallowed, so if a U.S. company has a patent on a drug, but a 3rd world country, completely independently invents the same or similar drug, they're prevented from doing their own research for their own people so that they can make drugs that are in their own country at a price that they can afford. And then, U.S. companies just, sort of, wave their patent around which is supported by the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement and people in that 3rd world country are completely priced out of being able to afford such medicines and then suffer real hardship and possible death.

Simon: Yeah, yeah. Jordan signed a free trade agreement with the U.S. which included such clauses in that and they found that medicine went up by about 40% according to Medicines Sans Frontiere and a lot of their health programs just had to be cut because they just didn't have the money to run them anymore. This was also true in Australia when we signed the free trade agreement with the U.S. with the public benefits health system where some medicine, although Australia negotiated it back from what the position was with Jordan, it still put up the prices of a lot of medicine here, at least to the government who covers it through the PBS.

Sam: Yeah and even for us it's not good, but for those 3rd world countries it could be catastrophic.

Simon: Yeah it's life or death for them.

Sam: I mean, here with the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and things like that it just means that we just have a bigger tax bill. *chuckles* Effectively.

Simon: Yeah, and then there's all, besides the pharmaceutical stuff which is quite bad, there's also all the anti-piracy proposals that include basically the wording of what they consider commercial file sharing is so vague so as to include, well, non-commercial file sharing. Someone using torrent software, that would be considered commercial according to the wording of the agreement.

Sam: Yeah, well it's a bit.. sometimes there are some grey areas there, like for instance putting ads next to torrent links and things like that. I've come across this issue a lot with Creative Commons as well, when people put creative commons on something and say, no commercial use allowed, and then the question becomes well, if you've got Google adwords on your site where you're providing a download link to something, is that commercial exploitation? So there are definitely issues to cover there. But I mean, seperately, even just that thing that you mentioned that anything that could be mis-construed as a negative for U.S. corporate profits, that governments would have to pay compensation, I mean, that feeds into it as well doesn't it?

Simon: Yeah I guess it could.

Sam: The MPAA can just stand up and say well this or that infringing website or even this individual is negatively impacting our profits so your government has to pay.

Simon: I think that would probably just relate to governemnt policy like if they were changing the law

Sam: Yeah

Simon: ..but, with the actual criminal liability that... where websites and advertising, that's not what they're actually talking about, the way it's worded it includes people who just host data that, y'know, who link off those sites, like click those links and download then. If you're hosting the data that you download that puts you in a position where you're hosting...

Sam: Right, cos presumably someone's paying for that hosting and you're making a commercial profit by having someone pay to rent that server where those infringing files are sitting.

Simon: I'd have to look up the exact wording of it, but yeah, it's sort of like that.

Sam: It's all... y'know it's difficult

Simon: Also that's, also with that, they want to have prison terms with criminal file sharing and if all file sharing becomes criminalised then that means it sort of crimilises everyone who shares any torrents.

Sam: Yes and that's the beginning of a police state really, is to pass a law that criminalises everybody and then it just becomes... where it gets enforced becomes sort of a political hot potato.

Simon: Yeah and then you see issues in the U.K. at the moment with the owner of T.V. shack being extradited to the U.S. to get tried for something that isn't actually illegal in the U.K. Australia's recently passed laws relaxing our extradition treaties too so something like that could easily become on the cards for any one of us, especially if the TPPA gets passed as the U.S. would like it. The only sort of bright side to the entire thing was after the Melbourne round, the Melbourne round was said to have gotten absolutely no where in terms and was an abysmal failure in terms of the IP chapter, so for people who actually support sane health policy and our civil liberties it was actually quite a succesful meeting.

Sam: Yeah well that is good to hear, and I think on that positive note we'll wrap it up, so thanks very much for coming on the webcast today.

Simon: Thanks for having me.

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Coming up next on The Pirate Party Australia Webcast is a segment where I'll be reading from some of the most well respected writers in Pirate Politics. Rather fittingly we'll begin with the man who started the movement Rick Folkvinge and his excellant essay The History Of Copyright. This essay originally appeared as a 7 part series on Rick's blog at falkvinge.net. This reading is from the version printed in a book of essays on Pirate Politics called No Safe Harbour that was recently released by the United States Pirate Party and is available for free download from nosafeharbour.com.

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HISTORY OF COPYRIGHT

by RICK FALKVINGE

In this essay, I will look at the history of copyright from 1350 until present day. The story of the history books differs quite strongly from what you usually hear from the copyright industry.

We’re starting with the advent of the Black Death in Western Europe in the 1350s. Like all other places, Europe was hit hard: people fled westward from the Byzantine Empire and brought with them both the plague and scientific writings. It would take Europe 150 years to recover politically, economically, and socially.

The religious institutions were the ones to recover the slowest. Not only were they hit hard because of the dense congregation of monks and nuns, but they were also the last to be repopulated, as parents needed every available child in the family’s economy, agriculture, etcetera, in the decades following the Plague.

This is relevant because monks and nuns were the ones making books in this time. When you wanted a book copied, you would go to a scribe at a monastery, and they would copy it for you. By hand. No copy would be perfect; every scribe would fix spelling and grammatical errors while making the copy, as well as introduce some new ones.

Also, since all scribes were employed (read controlled) by the Catholic Church, there was quite some limitation to what books would be produced. Not only was the monetary cost of a single book astronomical - one copy of The Bible required 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins (!!) - but there was also a limit to what teachings would be reproduced by a person of the clergy. Nothing contradicting the Vatican was even remotely conceivable.

By 1450, the monasteries were still not repopulated, and the major cost of having a book copied was the services of the scribe, an under -supplied craft still in high demand. This puts things in proportion, given the astronomical cost of the raw materials and that they were a minor cost in ordering a book. In 1451, Gutenberg perfected the combination of the squeeze press, metal movable type, oil based print inks and block printing. At the same time, a new type of paper had been copied from the Chinese, a paper which was cheap to make and plentiful. This made scribecraft obsolete more or less overnight.

The printing press revolutionized society by creating the ability to spread information cheaply, quickly, and accurately.

The Catholic Church, which had previously controlled all information (and particularly held a cornered market on the scarcity of information), went on a rampage. They could no longer control what information would be reproduced, could no longer control what people knew, and lobbied kings across Europe for a ban on this technology which wrestled control of the populace from them.

Many arguments were used to justify this effort, trying to win the hearts of the people for going back to the old order. One notable argument was, “How will the monks get paid?”

The Catholic Church would eventually fail in this endeavor, paving the way for the Renaissance and the Protestant movement, but not before much blood had been spilled in trying to prevent the accurate, cheap and quick distribution of ideas, knowledge, and culture.

This attempt culminated in France on January 13, 1535, when a law was enacted at the request of the Catholic Church, a law which forced the closure of all bookshops and stipulated death penalty by hanging for anybody using a printing press.

This law was utterly ineffective. Pirate print shops lined the country’s borders like a pearl necklace and pirate literature poured into France through contraband distribution channels built by ordinary people hungry for more things to read.

On May 23, 1533, Mary was formally declared a bastard by the archbishop. Her mother, Catherine, who was a catholic and the Pope’s protegé, had been thrown out of the family by her father Henry, who had turned protestant just to get rid of Catherine. This was an injustice Mary would attempt to correct all her life.

King Henry VIII wanted a son to inherit the Throne of England for the Tudor dynasty, but his marriage was a disappointment. His wife, Catherine of Aragon, had only borne him a daughter, Mary. Worse still, the Pope would not let him divorce Catherine in the hope of finding someone else to bear him a son.

Henry’s solution was quite drastic, effective, and novel. He converted all of England into Protestantism, founding the Church of England, in order to deny the Pope any influence over his marriage. Henry then had his marriage with Catherine of Aragon declared void on May 23, 1533, after which he went on to marry several other women in sequence. He had a second daughter with his second wife, and finally a son with his third wife. Unlike the bastard child Mary, her younger half -siblings - Elizabeth and Edward - were protestants.

Edward succeeded Henry VIII on the throne in 1547, at the age of nine. He died before reaching adult age. Mary was next in the line of succession, despite having been declared a bastard. Thus, the outcast ascended to the Throne of England with a vengeance as Mary I in 1553.

She had not spoken to her father for years and years. Rather, hers was the mission to undo her father’s wrongdoings to the Faith, to England, and to her mother, and to turn England back into Catholicism. She persecuted protestants relentlessly, publicly executing several hundred, earning her the nickname Bloody Mary.

She shared the concern of the Catholic Church over the printing press. The public’s ability to quickly distribute information en masse was dangerous to her ambitions to restore Catholicism, in particular their ability to distribute heretic material. (Political material, in this day and age, was not distinguishable from religious material.) Seeing how France had failed miserably in banning the printing press, even under threat of hanging, she realized another solution was needed. One that involved the printing industry in a way that would benefit them as well.

She devised a monopoly where the London printing guild would get a complete monopoly on all printing in England, in exchange for her censors determining what was fit to print beforehand. It was a very lucrative monopoly for the guild, who would be working hard to maintain the monopoly and the favor of the Queen’s censors. This merger of corporate and governmental powers turned out to be effective in suppressing free speech and political -religious dissent.

The monopoly was awarded to the London Company of Stationers on May 4, 1557. It was called copyright.

It was widely successful as a censorship instrument. Working with the industry to suppress free speech worked, in contrast to the French attempt in the earlier 1500s to ban all printing by decree. The Stationers worked as a private censorship bureau, burning unlicensed books, impounding or destroying monopoly -infringing printing presses, and denying politically unsuitable material the light of day. Only in doubtful cases did they care to consult the Queen’s censors for advice on what was allowed and what was not. Mostly, it was quite apparent after a few initial consultations.

There was obviously a lust for reading, and the monopoly was very lucrative for the Stationers. As long as nothing politically destabilizing was in circulation, the common people were allowed their entertainment. It was a win-win for the repressive Queen and for the Stationers with a lucrative monopoly on their hands.

Mary I died just one year later, on November 17, 1558. She was succeeded by her protestant half-sister Elizabeth, who went on to become Elizabeth I and one of the highest-regarded regents of England ever. Mary’s attempts to restore Catholicism to England had failed. Her invention of copyright, however, survives to this day.

After Bloody Mary had enacted the copyright censorship monopoly in 1557, neither the profitable industry guild nor the censoring Crown had any desire to abolish it. It would stand uninterrupted for 138 years.

As we have seen, the copyright monopoly was instituted as a censorship mechanism by Mary I in 1557 to prevent people from discussing or disseminating Protestant material. Her successor, Elizabeth I, was just as happy to keep the monopoly after Mary’s death in 1558 to prevent people from discussing or disseminating Catholic material.

During the 1600s, Parliament gradually tried to wrestle control of the censorship from the Crown. In 1641, Parliament abolished the court where copyright cases had been tried, the infamous Star Chamber. In effect, this turned violation of the monopoly into a sentence-l ess crime, much like jaywalking in Sweden today: While it was still technically a crime, and technically illegal, you could not be tried for it and there was no punishment. As a result, creativity in Britain soared into the stratosphere.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t what Parliament had had in mind at all.

In 1643, the copyright censorship monopoly was re-instituted with a vengeance. It included demands for pre-registrations of author, printer and publisher with the London Company of Stationers, a requirement for publication license before publishing anything, the right for the Stationers to impound, burn and destroy unlicensed equipment and books, and arrests and harsh punishments for anybody violating the copyright censorship.

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And we'll hear more of that gripping tale in the next episode, but for now this brings our webcast to a close. I'll leave you with a quote from Renai LeMai, editor of the blog Delimiter.com.au: When artists and consumers themselves get involved in the debate, a remarkable thing tends to happen: Self-interest largely disappears from the picture. Great art is never created from self-interest. It can only be created when an artist is driven by their creative impulse, and applies discipline to develop their talents.

The Pirate Party Australia Webcast, including all music, is written recorded and produced by Sam Kearns for Pirate Party Australia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Thanks for listening.