Trade pact aiding music, movie industry has critics

WASHINGTON, Sept 7 (Reuters) - A proposed anti-counterfeiting pact has some intellectual property experts concerned it will lead to intrusions into the lives of innocent people, including border searches of music players and laptops by customs agents looking for illegally obtained music and movies.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab announced last October would be completed by the end of 2008, is being negotiated with Canada, the 27-member European Union, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea and Switzerland.

The treaty is supported by the movie and music industry and other businesses which have aggressively sought to to defend their works from counterfeiting, commercial piracy and illegal copying over the Internet.

The treaty is being negotiated as an executive agreement, which means that it will not require approval by the U.S. Senate.

This worries Susan Sell, director of the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University.

"If it were a treaty it would be subject to congressional approval," she said. "I don't see the accountability. Consumers have not been invited into this process. It's a handful of industry and there's no balance."

Sell and the digital rights group Public Knowledge believe that the music and movie industry has already gone too far in fighting piracy.

Some controversial practices include requiring Internet service providers to help identify suspected pirates, lawsuits filed against thousands of people accused of file-sharing and placing digital locks on DVDs sold to consumers so they cannot be downloaded to the buyer's computer.

A U.S. trade official said border scrutiny of electronic devices for piracy was already legal.

"Our customs has had that authority for a very long time," the U.S. trade official told Reuters. "Our intention is to include that kind of provision in ACTA as well."

"From a practical standpoint, I can't see how they would go about doing something like that," added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It would be too time-consuming and resource intensive."

PRIVACY OR PIRACY?

One issue in question is how much help Internet service providers should provide in identifying pirates.

In the United States, the recording industry has subpoenaed Internet providers to identify the computers used to upload infringing material.

Handing such information to a corporation would be particularly controversial in Germany, Italy and Spain, where privacy laws are strict.

But the movie industry thinks privacy concerns are hindering efforts to protect intellectual property.

"Overly strict interpretations of national data privacy rules increasingly impede enforcement against an array of wrongs that occur on the Internet, including copyright theft," the Motion Picture Association of America said in comments on ACTA to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

"ACTA partners should ensure that the interpretation of data privacy rules appropriately balances the fundamental rights of privacy and property, including intellectual property, in such a way to encourage meaningful cooperation with telcos/ISPs," the association said.

Consumer advocates say the legal battle over whether the movie industry can pursue DVD owners who copy a movie onto their computer for their own use -- something that would be noncontroversial if the media was music or literature -- exemplifies the erosion of fair use for consumers.

DVDs are often encrypted and breaking that encryption is illegal under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"There's nothing wrong with suing somebody for copyright infringement. The problem is when they're taking such a blunderbuss approach," said Sherwin Sly, an attorney with Public Knowledge.

The last round of ACTA talks concluded in late July. They are due to resume in October.

The goal has been to wrap up the treaty by the end of this year, before the administration of President George W. Bush leaves office in January, although some in the intellectual property community think this is overly ambitious.

But Jonathan Band, another intellectual property expert, disagreed. "It's possible. It's possible. The Bush administration has a deadline," he said. "When people are motivated, they do things." (Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)