The entertainment industry's latest attempt to get their representatives in Congress to pass favorable laws has produced the proposed Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act (PIRATE Act). (What a name). The idea this time is to save the copyright holders the trouble and expense of having to sue for copyright infringement. The responsibility for that would now be with the Department for Justice (i.e. taxpayers). As Donna says, the industry reject compulsory licences because they don't want government interference in the private sector but it's ok for the government to interfere when it involves them picking up the industry's legal costs. This is a sad joke.

James Grimmelmann at Lawmeme has a wonderfully cutting perspective on US reaction the WTO's decision to declare the US in breach of international trade rules in relation to online gambling policies. I hope he won't mind me reproducing it in full here:

'Remember why those folks in Seattle were so mad at the WTO? Well, one of the big reasons was that local laws in developing countries (on issues such as environmental protection, labor standards, and cultural values) were at risk of being struck down as "barriers to trade." Trade is trade, said the U.S., and trade comes first, and countries just need to shut up and deal.

Well, oh how the tables have turned. A WTO panel ruled on Wednesday that the U.S. ban on online gambling is an illegal trade barrier. Outraged U.S. lawmakers have already promised to appeal. Surprise, surprise, the ideology that free trade trumps restrictive local values turns out to be much less appealing when the U.S. interests are aligned with "local values" instead of "free trade." '

An international coalition of civil liberties groups, led by Privacy International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have signed an open letter to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on the grave dangers of vast biometric-passenger-data sharing systems. Thanks to Ian Brown at FIPR for the following extract from Privacy International's media release:

The letter, spearheaded by Privacy International and the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) raises concerns about little-known plans to
imminently create international standards that will require the use of
biometrics and RFID (radio frequency) technology in all future
passports. The measures, being decided this week at a meeting of the
ICAO in Cairo, will result in a distributed international identification
database on all passport holders.

The open letter has been signed by, among others, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Statewatch, the UK based Foundation for Information
Policy Research, the Association for Progressive Communications and the
US based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The ICAO has agreed that the initial international biometric standard
for passports will be facial mapping. Adequate memory space in newly
issued passports will be reserved for additional biometrics such as
fingerprinting at the discretion of every government. The EU is already
calling for fingerprints to be included, along with an associated
European register of all biometrics. National authorities will store and
share these vast data reserves.

The measures, supported by the US and the EU, will ultimately create an
electronic ID system on hundreds of millions of travellers. Despite
serious implications for privacy and personal security, the process is
occurring without public engagement or debate. Rather than allowing this
important issue to be decided by parliaments, governments have delegated
the setting of standards to the ICAO, a UN-level organization that is
responsible for the standardization of travel documents, passenger data
systems and air travel requirements.

The legislative drivers for the ICAO system are already in pace. The
USA-PATRIOT Act, passed by the U.S. Congress after the events of
September 2001 included the requirement that the President certify a
biometric technology standard for use in identifying aliens seeking
admission into the U.S., within two years. The schedule for its
implementation was accelerated by another piece of legislation, the
little known Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act 2002.
Part of this second law included seeking international co-operation with
this standard. The incentive to international co-operation was made
clear:


"By October 26, 2004, in order for a country to remain eligible for
participation in the visa waiver program its government must certify
that it has a program to issue to its nationals machine-readable
passports that are tamper-resistant and which incorporate biometric and
authentication identifiers that satisfy the standards of the
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)."


These laws gave momentum to the standards that were being considered at
the ICAO by requiring visa waiver countries (which include many EU
countries, Australia, Brunei, Iceland, Japan, Monaco, New Zealand,
Norway, Singapore, and Slovenia) to implement biometrics into their
Machine-Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs), i.e. passports.

Based on projections from current passport and travel statistics,
biometric details of more than a billion people will be electronically
stored by 2015. Some of the countries sampled for this estimate are:

United States 90 million
United Kingdom 54 million
Japan 64 million
Canada 24 million
Australia 13 million
Russian Federation 50 million
Ireland 4 million
Taiwan 17 million
China 60 million

The Privacy International open letter warns:

"We are increasingly concerned that the biometric travel document
initiative is part and parcel of a larger surveillance infrastructure
monitoring the movement of individuals globally that includes
Passenger-Name Record transfers, API systems and the creation of an
intergovernmental network of interoperable electronic data systems to
facilitate access to each country's law enforcement and intelligence
information."

Privacy International has warned of "unprecedented" security threats
that could arise from the plan because of potential access by terrorists
and organised crime. Furthermore, the biometric standard being adopted
is "fundamentally flawed" and will result in a substantial number of
passengers being falsely identified as potential terrorists or wrongly
accused of holding fraudulent passports.

Dr Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow with Privacy International, warned: "This
is a potentially perilous plan. The ICAO must go back to the drawing
board or hold itself responsible for creating the first truly global
biometric database".

"Governments may claim that they are under an international obligation
to create national databases of fingerprints and face scans but we will
soon see nations with appalling human rights records generating massive
databases, and then requiring our own fingerprints and face-scans as we
travel."

He continued: "In January 2004 when the U.S. began fingerprinting and
face-scanning foreign visitors and storing this data for over fifty
years under the US-VISIT program, many countries responded with alarm.
With the biometric passport, however, every country may have its own
surveillance system, accumulating fingerprints and face-scans and
keeping them for as long as they wish with no regard to privacy or civil
liberties."