Hollywood tries it on at TPP talks
p2pnet view | 7 Jan 2011
Hollywood tries it on at TPP talks
A letter leaked in December 2010, shortly after the most recent round of Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement talks, revealed Hollywood wants TPP participants to “introduce statutory penalties for IP infringement, draft new laws regarding ISP liability, reduce the threshold to commercial scale infringement and target torrent search engines”, says IT News.
Taking part were Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, the US, and Vietnam.
The letter was from lobbyists fronting for the ‘US Business Coalition’, a group of venal, vested-interest outfits including the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America, and the US Chamber of Commerce.
No prizes for guessing who led this pack of corporate hyenas.
“TPP parties should agree to make internet piracy a law enforcement priority and agree to prosecute not only direct infringers, but also those who purposefully take steps to promote infringement and ‘profit from developing and maintaining services that effectively induce it’,” says the ‘coalition’, according to the story, which states:
“It also wished to shift the emphasis, when considering ‘commercial scale’ infringement, away from questions over the infringer’s profit motive to the ‘harm to the infringed party’.
They also want TPP signatories to provide ISPs with “guidelines on liability and applicable limitations”.
That would “provide legal incentives for service providers to cooperate with right holders in deterring piracy”, says the ‘coalition’.
But Public Knowledge’s Rashmi Rangnath is quoted as saying this equates to ISPs being asked “to act as copyright cops and treating individual infringers with the same severity as large-scale pirates”.
Look familiar to you?
Stay tuned.
(Cheers, Filip)
