Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation were two of five groups that wrote a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman Monday asking that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement “not include measures restricting adoption of the Copyright Office’s recent proposals regarding orphan works.” Orphan works are books, articles, photos, recordings and other documents that are protected by copyright held by an unknown owner. The Register of Copyrights issued a report in May that included a “variety of proposals to expand access to copyrighted works,” said the letter, also signed by Authors Alliance, Knowledge Economy International and New Media Rights. The proposals aren't law and it’s possible Congress won't act or embrace a new approach entirely, it said. Though the groups that signed the letter vary in their preferences to how the issue should be remedied, all asked that the “TPP not adopt measures that would prevent the Congress from enacting these or other such provisions should they be needed at some point to expand access to orphaned copyrighted works.”
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative seeks comment by Oct. 28 to help prepare its annual National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, including on telecom issues, USTR said in Wednesday's Federal Register. The report spells out the “most important” foreign trade barriers affecting U.S. goods trade, foreign direct investment and intellectual property rights protections. USTR aims to use the report to dismantle those barriers in future trade negotiations, said the agency. The office said it will review trade deals on U.S. telecom products and services to see if any trade laws, policies or practices with countries with which America has trade or telecom deals deny this country's firms "mutually advantageous market opportunities for telecommunications products and services." Comment via www.regulations.gov, docket number USTR 2015-0014. USTR released the last National Trade Estimate Report in March.
A federal court accepted the requests of parties to file amicus briefs supporting petitioners challenging the FCC net neutrality and broadband reclassification order. An order Tuesday of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in USTelecom v. FCC, No. 15-1063, granted the motions of: (A) Richard Bennett, (B) the Business Roundtable, National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, (C) Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology, (D) Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, Georgetown University, (E) International Center for Law and Economics and Affiliated Scholars, (F) former FCC employee William Kirsch, (G) Mobile Future, (H) Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, (I) Phoenix Center, (J) Telecommunications Industry Association and (K) Christopher Yoo, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, ex-FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth and Washington Legal Foundation had filed notices of their intent to file amicus briefs; lawyers for the three said they didn't have to file motions because they received the consent of all the parties to the case. (For more on the arguments the parties plan to make in their briefs, see 1507130064, 1507140035, 1507150012, 1507210054 and 1507270045). The briefs of the amici and intervenors supporting petitioners are due Thursday. Tuesday's order also directed the court's clerk to file Kirsch's brief, which he submitted early to protect petitioner due process rights. Kirsch said the FCC arbitrarily and capriciously failed to address his comments in the net neutrality proceeding on international telecom. "The FCC is entitled to deference for a Title II Court-guided classification, but should be subject to a de novo review for a quasi-judicial standard in place of the rules based approach that should be required of a so-called expert agency," Kirsch's brief said. It addressed intervenors' standing to address harm from "gatekeepers" and petitioners' standing to address harm from the U.S. Trade Representative's decision ceding the country's telecom advantage in the World Trade Organization agreement on basic telecom to trading partners, including China.
The U.S. and its Information Technology Agreement (ITA) partners struck a deal this weekend to open “the door for swift conclusion” of an ITA expansion deal in Geneva, said the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. A finalized expansion would be the first time in nearly 20 years that World Trade Organization parties locked down a “major” accord to cut tariffs, said the USTR office in a statement. The accord will eliminate tariffs on roughly 200 products, said the WTO in a predeal statement. Eighty countries are party to the ITA, including the EU bloc.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative removed Paraguay from its 2015 Special 301 Watch List after the U.S. signed an intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement with the country Thursday, USTR said in a statement. The agency plans an out-of-cycle review of Paraguay in the near future, the statement said. USTR released its most recent edition of the Special 301 Report in late April (see 1505010009). Paraguay has "stepped up its efforts to strengthen IPR protection and enforcement" over the past 18 months, said USTR.
The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2015 Special 301 Report “is another one-sided and harmful missive to the rest of the world that names and shames countries for not mirroring, or even exceeding, the United States’ restrictive copyright rules,” said Electronic Frontier Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm and Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton in a blog post Thursday. The report, released Thursday, said USTR kept China and India among the 13 countries on its priority watch list for copyright and other IP rights violations. USTR had elevated Ecuador and Kuwait to the priority watch list since it published its 2014 report (see 1504300061). The 2015 report places a high importance on trade secret protections as criteria for criticizing other countries’ IP rights practices, with the USTR never specifically defining what it considers a trade secret protection. That means the term “can encompass a wide range of information that it encourages nations to protect with heavy-handed enforcement,” EFF said. The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s most recent draft IP language is “dangerously broad,” and if “this is the kind of language that the USTR holds as a minimum standard for enforcement, we should expect to see the agency to increasingly push for draconian rules that would threaten critical reporting published online,” EFF said. The 2015 report also includes a renewed emphasis on domain name disputes, calling on countries to protect U.S. trademarks.
China and India will remain among the 13 countries on the U.S. Trade Representative’s priority watch list this year for copyright and other IP rights violations, the USTR office said Thursday in its annual special 301 report. China and India have improved their IP policies, but other new policies have become a cause for concern, said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman on a conference call with reporters. Other nations on the priority watch list are Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela. The report placed another 24 countries on the USTR’s lower-tier watch list: Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Guatemala, Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Romania, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The 2014 special 301 report included 10 countries on the priority watch list and 27 on the regular watch list (see 1405020082).
Foreign governments continue to routinely use local content requirements for domestic telecommunications infrastructure, restricting engagement in trade and global supply chains, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said in a review of telecommunications provisions in free trade agreements and World Trade Organization pacts. The U.S. will continue to pressure removal of those barriers to put in place “market-oriented” commerce, said the agency in its annual review, released April 1 (here).
CTIA hires Kara Romagnino, ex-Mintz Levin, as director-regulatory affairs, and Hank Kilgore, ex-office of then-Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., as director-government affairs ... Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., hires Greta Milligan Peisch, ex-Office of U.S. Trade Representative, as international trade counsel ... TVEyes promotes Dan Miles to chief operating officer, new position ... Adaptive Medias names Omar Akram to president and chief financial officer.
Last week’s U.S. Trade Representative Special 301 report on “notorious” IP markets claimed that domain “registrars are required … to take action by locking or suspending domains when they receive a notice about one of their domains facilitating illegal activity,” an Electronic Frontier Foundation blog post said Tuesday. “This isn't true, and by claiming it is, USTR is here repeating the United States entertainment industry's current talking points,” notably those of MPAA and RIAA, it said. ICANN has an agreement with registrars that they should act when “notified of illegal activity,” including piracy and counterfeiting, the report (see 1503050040) said. “On the same day as the Notorious Markets list was published, the RIAA wrote a letter to ICANN claiming that it is not ‘appropriate’ for registrars to deny any obligation to respond to their members' complaints,” EFF said. MPAA, RIAA and USTR didn’t comment.