SWMS560/ACTA/Draft

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Contents

Introduction

In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), a piece of legislation that lengthened the duration of copyright for everything created in the U.S. since 1923. One of many such extensions during the late-20th century, the CTEA is remarkable for two reasons. First, the new terms are of an historically unprecedented scale: 95 years after the creation of a new work or 75 years after the author's death. This means that a book written in 1923 will not enter the public domain until 2018. Of greater interest to this paper, however, are the peculiar circumstances of the CTEA's passage. As its very name suggests, the Act makes inheritance and kinship central principles to a new understanding of intellectual property in the U.S.

Before joining the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, Sonny Bono was a record producer, singer, actor, and recording artist. A pro-business fiscal conservative, the extension of copyright was one of Representative Bono's primary concerns in Congress. According to Mary Bono, his wife and eventual successor in the House, Bono preferred that there be no limit on the duration of copyright protection (Lessig, 2004, 215). He believed that authors, broadly defined, have a natural right to exploit their creative output and should be able to pass on fruitful copyright monopolies to their heirs though a system of formal inheritance. That his wife argued passionately for the bill following his death is unsurprising. With a near-perpetual copyright term, she and her children can continue to benefit from his creative labor long after his passing.

Ten years after the passage of the CTEA, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk met with representatives of several other World Trade Organization member nations to begin drafting a multilateral trade agreement that might disrupt the global flow of "counterfeit" and "pirated" goods and services. Still under revision at the time of this writing, the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a voluntary agreement among participanting nations to deploy a mutually beneficial infrastructure by which trade activities that infringe on the "intellectual proprerty rights" of one or another "rights holders" will be investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted and punished. Widely criticized for a lack of transparency, a working draft of the document was released anonymously to the web on January 18, 2010 and followed shortly after by a flurry of criticism among bloggers and political advocacy groups.

In this paper, I will examine three layers of disagreement that arise from the phenomenon of the leaked ACTA draft with special attention to the implicit assumption of patrilineal inheritance and heteronormative kinship. The first layer concerns the changing attitudes toward "intellectual property" among policy-makers in the U.S. since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The second layer examines some of the major disagreements within the various parties contributing to the development of ACTA. And the third layer gathers criticism of ACTA from around the English-speaking web. I find that the fundamental problem of inheritance is scarcely discussed in any of these layers and that quite narrow understandings of kinship uncritically persist throughout the various discourses.

US intellectual property rights

The recommendations in ACTA build on existing multinational structures that reflect the U.S. intellectual property tradition.[1]. In the U.S. context, intellectual property rights are expressed through the assignment of limited monopolies to authors and inventors (Boyle, 2008, 21). These monopolies create artificial scarcity such that a new idea (patent) and its expression (copyright) may become productive sites for the acculumation of capital. By granting authors an exclusive right to commercially exploit these opportunities, the government balances out the risks associated with developing a new idea.

Historically, this intervention into the free market has been justified according to two very different ontologies of originality and ownership. In the dominant discourse of the late-18th century, such policy was understood as a necessary evil to promote a productive intellectual culture. Two centuries later, wide circulation of the term "intellectual property" reflects a belief that the output of an individual's cognitive process is a commidity that can be owned or exchanged. As the latter ontology came to prominence among U.S. policymakers, their reasoning for offering a state-sponsored monopoly shifted away from providing incentives and became a defense of natural rights. To better understand this transition, I will briefly consider three milestones in the development of U.S. intellectual property law: the Copyright Act of 1790, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1994.[2]

Constitutional copyright

"[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8.

Of the ill fit of ideas and exclusivity, Jefferson wrote that, "the moment [an idea] is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone" (Boyle, 2008, 20). He believed that the free expression and publication of ideas benefited the public and encouraged the Enlightenment project of social progress. Though the Constitution grants Congress the power to temporarily limit the circulation of ideas, this clause is also an implicit assertion that intellectual output is inherently shared and can only be made exclusive through state intervention. The framers provided for copyright and patent monopolies in the hope that by providing an incentive for authors and inventors, intellectually-driven economic activity - "Science and useful Arts" - might flourish in the new nation.

When Congress passed the first copyright law in 1790, they decided that 14 years was a reasonably "limited" time for authors and inventors to commercially exploit their intellectual output. At the end of this period, living rights holders could apply for an extension to another 14 years. When the copyright term expired, the author's writing and the inventor's ideas rose into the public domain unencumbered by legal restrictions. For authors and inventors depending on the state-sponsored monopoly for their livelihoods, the term limit served a second incentivizing purpose. It gave them 14 years with which to produce another lucrative intellectual work. In this sense, both the monopoly and its termination are critical to the Constitutional purpose of encouraging progress and productivity.

In this original implementation, copyright law required authors to register their works and to mark them with a © symbol. In its first year, only five percent of eligible books were registered. The other ninety-five per cent rose immediately to the public domain (Lessig, 2004, 137). Furthermore, a copyright monopoly could only be renewed if the registered author or inventor was still living. This criteria indicates that the 1790 Congress linked the copyright monopoly with an embodied author; not his estate, nor his business, nor his employer.[3]

Copyright act of 1976

The Copyright Act of 1976 marks a curious depature from the legislation passed in 1790. The new regime removed the registration and renewal requirements and granted the maximum term for all copyright monopolies (Lessig, 2004, 135).[4] Since the Act went into effect in 1978, every expression of an idea in a fixed medium is now subject to the scrutiny of law and its ever-present disciplinary threat. Class notes, home videos, and doodles on the back of a napkin are granted the same copyright monopoly as a dissertation, documentary film, or lithographic print. The most immediate effect of these changes is that nothing created since 1978 has risen to the public domain without being explicit disowned by its author.

Two compelling arguments undergird the removal of a copyright registration requirement. First, by automating the assignment of a copyright monopoly, the government considerably reduces the administrative burden of registering, renewing, and maintaining a database of works and authors. Second, automatic copyright assignment is seen by some to correct a confusing system of registration that unfairly benefits a small number of rights brokers at the expensive of individual authors and artists. The history of the pop music industry in the U.S. provides countless examples in which copyright law is used to prevent (overwhelmingly Black) musicians from being appropriately compensated by the corporations that publish their songs and recordings (Chapple & Garofalo, 1977). Unfortunately, the law is rarely an unproblematic solution to itself.

M. Jacqui Alexander describes the development of legislation as the "naturalization" and "normalization" of a particular structure of power (2005, 25). To understand the Copyright Act of 1976 as a corrective to exploitation is to foreclose the possibility that there are authors and inventors who choose knowingly not to seek the copyright monopoly. The Act normalizes an "intellectual property" regime in which all expressive activity is automatically and immediately drawn into the regulatory sphere of state power. This is only possible because of an implicit belief the tangible artifacts of individual expression belong naturally to their authors. Whereas the 1790 Act created a voluntary incentive, the 1976 Act imposes an ontology of ownership that transforms nearly every expressive act into a site of potential state regulation and commercial exploitation.

The Enlightenment principles with which Jefferson and his contemporaries were so concerned are largely absent the 1976 legislation. Rather than promote a nationalist agenda of social progress, the contemporary legislation assures the maintainence of individual property rights at the expense of the public domain. Unlike Jefferson's belief that ideas are the least scarce of all resources, the 1976 Act suggests a "romantic theory of authorship" in which novelty and originality are the natural provenance of an individual laboring in the solitude of his Cartesian mind (Boyle, 2008, 32-33). Persistent ambiguity regarding the relationship between copyright law and collage, sampling, and parody reflects the inadequacy of the romantic theory to describe the culturally- and historically-bound practices of popular culture.

The 1976 law also differentiates "natural" authors from corporations. The split is based not on the philosophical differences between corpus and corporation but on the pragmatic reality of a corpse. The copyright term described by the 1976 Act extends fifty years beyond the author's death. Because a corporation does not die, its term required greater specificity and was set at seventy-five years.

By considerably lengthening the copyright term, the 1976 Act removes the incentive to continually produce new ideas. Instead, the new legislation is optimized for "one hit wonders" who invest their energies in the continued exploitation of existing ideas. By establishing the possibility of a posthumous monopoly, the Act also departs from the earlier arrangement by extending the copyright reward to an authors' heirs. Less the victims of "tired blood" than shrewd actors, children of "one hit wonders" are better served by lobbying Congress for another copyright term extension than laboring to create an exploitable idea of their own.

By removing the registration requirement and extending the monopoly term beyond the life of an author, the Copyright Act of 1976 ceased to serve an incentivizing function. Instead, the new legislation transformed copyright law into a mechanism for regulating all expressive activity and sustaining a peculiar ontology of ownership and originality. The resulting system undermined the belief structure by which the original legislation was justified and promoted the notion that authors (and their heirs) have a natural right to exploit in perpetuity the artifacts of intellectual labor. Furthermore, by categorizing corporations separately from individual authors, the Act established the state-sponsored copyright monopoly as a commidity in and of itself that might be assigned value, exchanged, and, most significantly, inherited.

Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1994

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1994 (CTEA) lengthened the maximum copyright term to death plus seventy years for a "natural" author and 120 years from creation for a corporate "author". Lessig suggests that Congress' willingness to continue extending the copyright term in the face of the Constitution's clear mandate that the monopoly be "limited" is the result of corruption. Wealthy rights holders (in particular, the heirs to a successful author's estate) are willing to spend considerable sums of money on lobbying and campaign contributions to ensure that they can continue to profit from the intellectual labor of their forebears (Lessig, 2004, 217-218). But corruption is not my concern in this paper.

The CTEA so brazenly extended the copyright term that it inspired Eric Eldred, an amateur librarian in New Hampshire, to sue the government. Eldred v. Ashcroft rose to the Supreme Court on appeal where Lessig argued unsuccessfully that Congress had overstepped the bounds of its Constitutional power by "regularly" extending the copyright term to the point of being "effectively unlimited" (2004, 229-243). The winning argument issued by the government was supported largely by amicus briefs prepared by major media companies. They crafted an emotional appeal in which beloved "American icons" such as Disney films, Dr. Seuss books, and Gershwin music might be used to "glorify drugs or create pornography" should their copyright term expire (Lessig, 2004, 233). Despite a lack of empirical evidence to support this titillating hypothetical,[5] the government's argument prevailed and the CTEA was upheld.

The Supreme Court's decision to contradict Constitutional mandate and allow Congress to extend copyright in perpetuity was not based on the belief that "intellectual property" is a natural right as one might expect from the earlier discussion. Insted, the Court was moved by testimony from the estates of Seuss, Gershwin, and others who argued that an on-going copyright monopoly enabled them to "protect" the works of long-dead authors. From this view, the Court effectively granted Congress the power to use copyright term extensions to safeguard "American" culture against transformation.

Lessig was surprised that the five "conservative" justices sitting on the Supreme Court in 2003 did not share his strict interpretation of the Constitution's limits on Congressional power but he failed to consider another facet of "conservative" political philosophy: the preference for tradition and aversion to change. The justices feared a future in which the icons of their youth no longer dominate the media ecology of American culture. This vision, so powerful that it drove them to contradict their country's founding doctrine, is essentially rooted in a selfhood that stretches into the future by way of offspring and inheritance. When the justices act to protect Mickey, they must do so out of fear for the well-being of their grandchildren. After all, what harm could Disney-derived porn do to a sitting member of the Supreme Court? The instinct to protect Mickey is an instinct to protect an imagined self embodied as heir.

ACTA

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a proposed multilateral trade agreement that is presently being developed by a subset of member countries from the World Trade Organization (WTO). The goal of the agreement is to implement globally uniform practices for handling cases of suspected "counterfeiting" and "piracy". To date, the process has been conducted largely in secret, a situation only somewhat relieved when a copy of the draft document was anonymously leaked onto the internet on January 18, 2010.[6] President Obama voiced support for the process[7] and the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released its own version of the working document on April 23.[8]

The leaked document offers a revealing view into the murky practices of multilateral trade negotionation. It includes evidence of countless disagreements among participants in the form of in-line comments and bracketed suggestions. For example, it is clear from the start that the U.S. and Japan prefer the term "intellectual property rights" while Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore insist on writing out "copyright or related rights and trademarks" (3). Since its release, the draft document has drawn considerable critique and analysis from scholars, bloggers, and public interest organizations.[9]

The leaked ACTA document indicates that its working definition of "intellectual property rights" is based on the WTO's 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). The TRIPs definition reflects the characteristics of the contemporary U.S. copyright regime identified above: automatic copyright, a copyright term that extends 50 years beyond the author's death, and the commoditization of a state-sponsored monopoly. The emphasis on "counterfeiting" and "piracy" discursively positions ACTA within the sphere of trade policy but as the Eldred example illustrates, regulation of "intellectual property" always has an effect on expressions of culture. The kinds of materials explicitly discussed in the leaked ACTA text include software, music, film, and fashion - the same pop artifacts from and through which popular culture is made, negotiated, and expressed (Bourriard, 2007; Fiske, 1989).[10] Despite the stated economic purpose of ACTA, it is also, in fact, a proposed system for regulating the growth and circulation of popular culture.

Unlike the laws of Congress, ACTA is an "executive agreement" which the President can enact without consulting either of the other branches of government. Ambassador Ron Kirk, the U.S. Trade Representative, is the voice of the U.S. in ACTA negotiations. At this point, the precise number of other participating countries is not known, though Kirk recently wrote to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), that it includes

"several trading partners, including Australia, Canada, the European Union and its 27 member states, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and Switzerland."[11]

The document makes frequent reference to "developing" nations but does not enumerate specific territories or populations. Furthermore, there is no mechanism at present for members of the public, industry stakeholders, humanitarian organizations, legal scholars, or other academics to engage directly with the negotiation. Kirk explains that though the participants would like to consider "meaningful input" from the public, secrecy is necessary for participants to speak "frankly" to one another.[12]

Criticism of ACTA

Tensions within the leaked document

ACTA is a work in progress. The inline comments and bracketed text in the leaked PDF reveal points of tension among the various participants. In the discussion of Damages, several participants disagree about whether or not and under what circumstances the "losing party" in a case of infringement should pay the attorney fees of the "winning party" (6). Mexico warns that requiring suspected infringers to disclose information related to the "origin and distribution network" of infringing goods might violate local laws (7; 16-17). The U.S. and the E.U. disagree about the details by which devices that might be used to circumvent anti-piracy technologies can be criminalized (31).

Upon finding the leaked ACTA document covered in marks, revisions, and qualifications, I expected to find heated disagreement among participants unwilling to simply accept the United States' ontology of ownership and originality. Instead, this belief system underlies the fundamental tenents of the text and its assumptions remain uncontroversial among the ACTA participants. They agree, for example, on such incomprehensible passages as the following definition of "rights holder":

"a person that exclusively has any one or more of the intellectual property rights encompassed in a given intellectual property" (2).

And they appear to unanimously approve provisions for the seizure and/or destruction of tools and materials that might be used to infringe an "intellectual property right" in situations where infringement is "imminent" but has yet to occur (6-8). There is no philosophical grounding for the concept of "intellectual property rights" and the term "infringement" is discussed without elaboration or practical guidance (11). Instead of exploring this discourse, participants in the agreement are encouraged to collaborate with the private sector to develop "education projects" that "raise public awareness [about] the detrimental effects of intellectual property rights infringement" (42). Despite the appearance of disagreement, the leaked ACTA document might as well be a companion text to the Copyright Act of 1976.

Criticism surrounding the leaked document

Prior to the availability of the leaked ACTA draft, its critics tended to focus on issues of accountability, transparency, and oversight. In July of 2008, Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge wrote, "the extent of what is known about ACTA and its provisions can fit on a single sheet of paper" (Siy, 2008). Confronted on an airplane, Ambassador Kirk explained, "people would walk away from the table" if the proposed terms of the agreement were made public (Love, 2009). Some critics concluded that the reason for obfuscation was that the measures being discussed would override their existing laws (Geist, 2009). Others used the lack of transparency to criticize President Obama, suggesting that it was a sign of his willingness to break campaign promises (Kravets, 2009).

The leaked text finally disaffirmed fears that ACTA would override existing U.S. law or impose new penalties. In fact, the agreement seemed to merely "mirror" existing U.S. intellectual property laws (Sheffner, 2010).[13] As with the content of the leaked document, criticism of ACTA has tended to focus on the details of its implementation without questioning the fundamental assumptions on which it is constructed. But ACTA is not simply a "harmonizing" of existing laws among participating nations, it is explicitly designed as an evangelical tool with which to spread the peculiar ontology of the U.S. intellectual property regime to as-yet uninvolved "developing countries" (37).

"Promoting a culture of intellectual property"

Largely absent from both the internal negotiations among ACTA participants and the contextual discourse of ACTA critics is a inquiry after the ontology of ownership and creativity that undergirds the U.S. intellectual property regime. This gap is especially problematic given the provisions in the leaked ACTA draft for providing "assistance" to "developing countries not Party to the Agreement" (36-37). In addition to building infrastructure and providing technical assistance, it is suggested that "developed" countries provide "training for enforcement officials" and help developing nations "strengthen [their intellectual property]] legislation" (37). In short, the ACTA participants propose working with "relevant private sector" organizations to "promote the culture of intellectual property" in developing countries (37).

Whereas the centrality of culture in the context of U.S. intellectual property law only became apparent through the perplexing decision of the Supreme Court in Eldred, the text of ACTA makes its stakes much more plain. In response to a flood of overstated criticism of ACTA by bloggers, Nate Anderson cautioned, "[your] statements are strong, but the document they are based on is not" (2009). Anderson's mild rebuff was intended to redirect the critics' attention. "The real problem here is not for US residents," he wrote, "but for everyone else."

To confront the threat ACTA poses to popular cultures within and without the U.S. territories, it is necessary to return once again to Jefferson's comments on ownership and ideas. In his footnotes to an historical account of intellectual property law in the U.S., Boyle urges is not to "forget the other side of Jefferson and the social system which allowed him to write" (Boyle, 2008, 255-256). Boyle is referring, of course, to the fact that Jefferson's productivity was only possible through the enslavement of people he considered less than human. Jefferson dismissed the notion that property constituted a "natural" right and instead called it a "gift of social law" - a horrifying declaration given the circumstances within which it was written (Boyle, 2008, 19).

At the outset of this paper, I presented a narrative in which copyright and patent monopolies were first granted as incentives only to be recast centuries later in terms of "natural rights." How does this narrative, which so motivates ACTA's critics, erradicate and obscure the on-going violence of colonialism? How is it possible that Jefferson and his contemporaries could see ideas as less well-suited to ownership than human beings? And through what moral surgery is it ever possible to cite Jefferson's observations on intellectual property without also calling forth his daily trade in human property?

When the Copyright Act of 1790 was written, the questions "Who can own?" and "What can be owned?" were of central concern. The lawmakers who drafted and ratified the Act asserted that, for some limited period of time, the state would ensure that the expression of an idea could be owned. The dominant historical view asserts that these men did not believe in the notion of a "natural" intellectual property right. Lessig writes that the Copyright Act of 1976 represents an abandonment of a "sensible" system (2004, 135). But this view flattens history and denies the context in which the legislation was written.

The automatic copyright monopoly granted by the Copyright Act of 1976 was an epistemic impossibility for the politicians of 1790. On a purely practical level, such a law could not function in a society in which only a small subset of the population could own property. What would happen if the daughter of a senator wrote a poem on a piece of paper? Would she retain the right to that expression or would it automatically revert to her father?

Boyle concludes his footnote about Jefferson by asking, "What was he thinking?" This question cannot be relegated to the footnotes. It must be made central to attempt a reconstruction of the discursive setting within which Jefferson composed his particular ontology of ideas. In a socio-cultural moment in which people and property are indistinct, what are ownership's boundaries? Can a person who is owned be, in turn, an owner? How was ownership colloquially and privately understood outside of the discourse of public law?

The late-20th century turn toward "natural" intellectual property rights forges an immediate bond between (intellectual) labor and the body. Ideas become ownable once they have issued forth from the body, in writing or in speech, and been fixed to a medium. Only then is a legal ownership link drawn back to the issuing body. Saidiya Hartman's frustrating return to Africa suggests that there are labors and products of the body with which a person may not wish to be linked (2007). How does the discourse of "natural" intellectual property rights limit the kinds of forgetting that Hartman encounters in Ghana?

Inheritance seems to be the discursive site at which culture, commerce, and law converge. Earlier I discussed the tacit role of inheritance in driving a corrupt Congress to pass regular copyright term extensions. Boyle cautions that "censorious heirs" or "purchasers of copyright" might squander a work for idiosyncratic moral/political reasons (Boyle, 2008, 25). As with my Jeffersonian narrative, I wish to investigate the assumptions inherent to these analyses.

To accuse the heirs of a copyright-rich estate of laziness misses the opportunity to inquire after the relationship between two discursively similar sets of "natural rights": intellectual property and inheritance. Inheritance is naturalized as an extension of the heterosexual family structure. The child, like the expression of an idea, issues forth from a living body and is immediately linked by law to that body in perpetuity. How do copyright absolutists like Sonny Bono distinguish their intellectual property from their children?

Elizabeth Povenelli's discussion of the sores she developed while living in Belyuen, Australia suggests a blurry boundary between ownership and kinship. For the people she encounters in Belyuen, ownership of the body is neither natural nor absolute. "The sore on my body is not my sore," she writes, "though whose sore it is may be unclear" (2006, 46). In other words, the sore is not a sign or a token that signifies kinship. Rather, ownership of the sore is spread throughout the kin, though it is materially attached to Povinelli's skin. Is it possible that for some families in the U.S., a posthumous copyright monopoly functions similarly to the sore in that it bears a material link back to the body of deceased kin? Alternatively, is it possible that the idea or expression being kept out of circulation is more like a sore that binds people according to a kinship logic not recognized as family by contemporary law or culture?

To put it another way, how is ownership of an "intellectual property" assessed and contested? The law ascribes authorship at the moment when an expression issues forth from a body and is fixed in a medium. In a moment of widespread access to replication and distribution technologies, the circulation of this expression is very difficult to constrain. Imagine a population of people for whom one of Sonny Bono's songs is a point of social and cultural convergence. Much like the sore, they could not say that any one of them owns either the song or its significance. But each them might be equally reluctant to accept that Sonny Bono's heirs ought to exercise control over this significant artifact. In the same sense as I imagine Povinelli could not use the sore as evidence of her legal status as kin, contemporary U.S. law does not recognize the relationship of a devoted fan as one of ownership.

Conclusion

ACTA is an effort to force the global adoption of a peculiar ontology of ownership and originality. That its development continues in spite of considerable criticism suggests that the fundamental tenets of the project are actually supported, rather than challenged, by its critics. No analytic tools currently exist to oppose the trade agreement. The legal and cultural structure of inheritance offers a potentially destructive loose thread for unraveling the many interrelated discourses of "natural rights" but this process will not lead to a strategy, tactic, or campaign. ACTA persists because it reflects a cultural norm that conflates ownership and kinship, property with family.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ For example, see the WTO's 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm
  2. ↑ The Constitution provides for both copyright and patent law in Article I Section 8. For practical reasons, this paper draws primarily on examples from copyright law. Though the history of patent law differs in some fascinating respects, the central assumptions regarding kinship and inheritance are the same.
  3. ↑ Of course, my choice of pronouns here is not mere habit. As is discussed later, only certain categories of people in the 18th century U.S. were able to claim a copyright on their work.
  4. ↑ This is one of the key constrasts between copyright and patent law. Patents still require registration with the United States Patent Office.
  5. ↑ In fact, public domain American icons like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn abound in erotic literature. In spite of countless works of Tom/Huck slash fiction, the reputation of Mark Twain's one true pair survives more or less untarnished.
  6. ↑ https://sites.google.com/site/iipenforcement/acta
  7. ↑ http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-export-import-banks-annual-conference
  8. ↑ http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/press-releases/2010/april/office-us-trade-representative-releases-draft-text-a
  9. ↑ https://sites.google.com/site/iipenforcement/home/blogs-on-acta
  10. ↑ My use of the term "popular" refers to the norms and practices by which groups of people come to know themselves as members of a community. I will use the term "pop" to refer to artifacts of the entertainment industries.
  11. ↑ http://www.scribd.com/doc/27806873/Ron-Kirk-Letter-to-Ron-Wyden-re-ACTA
  12. ↑ Ibid.
  13. ↑ Closer legal analysis reveals several points at which the draft proposal departs from or contradicts U.S. policy but these do not constitute major departures from the tradition outlined earlier in this paper (Hinze, 2010).

References

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