Ikväll skickar jag in min kandidatur till Piratpartiets valberedning, med förhoppning om att bli vald till styrelsen på partiets årsmöte. Med alla kompetenta aktiva i partiet lär det bli hård konkurrens. Spännande!

Mina åsikter i partifrågor:

Summary:

Detailed trade agreements would appear to cause a problem insofar as they are difficult to change (not impossible, but in many cases much slower to change than say national or union legislation). Rigid legislation and difficult-to-change laws might cause a problem for enterprises operating in environments that change fast, like the ICT industry or commericial creative enterprises.

Unarguably, there is legal precedent for exporting legislation in trade agreements. Trade agreements in general have actually become more and more detailed over the last decades, up until now when they seem to even directly copy legislation from close economic and customs partnerships like the European Union.

Essentially, the CARIFORUM EPA is so detailed and so extensive it almost includes CARIFORUM in the European Union (see this reference). The only difference is basically less extensive capital flow regulation.

But well, it might have been better for us if CARIFORUM had joined the Union instead of signing the EPA. Why?

This is a bit of a long post. So here's a summary:

Intellectual property rights today are largely regulated by international trade agreements. International trade agreements are negotiated under secrecy. The most known example so far is ACTA, which might turn out to be extremely detailed while leaving no room for public debate over the content at all - since the content is unknown! However, this has and is already happening. Trade agreements are being negotiated and have been signed that are extremely detailed, and it's happening with no public debate. It's Christmas for people that feel inclined to like repressive legislation enough make it permanent beyond repair, and the following rather lengthy text describes, I hope, why.

We've been looking into trade agreements lately. It started out with ACTA, some time last year, but as noted by FFII there's a trade agreement between the European Communities and South Korea which was signed by all parties last year in October. That trade agreement will still have to be approved by the European Parliament, and this hasn't happened yet. Reading the analysis of of the treaty, it would appear that it's very desirable that it doesn't pass.

There is another thing.

Supposing that the Korea FTA and Canada CETA are accepted, we can assume that ACTA will at least not contradict this legislation. ACTA will with a high likelyhood contain enforcement provisions, intellectual property rights provision exceeding those of previous acquis communautaire (but included in IPRED2 draft) and customs regulation.

So we need to make diffs between the Korea FTA, Canada CETA and existing EU legislation from eur-lex.eu. We have a script for this, which creates a list comparing the agreement texts with directive text. Available dumps can be found here.

However, we also need to create a way to illustrate the differences in a good way. We're using euwiki.org for making these diff tables. It's not nice-looking, so we need a better way of creating wiki-diffs or other diff tables that provide an easy-to-overview diff.

We're greatful for any help.

Yeah. I'm an adamant blogger today.

I have met up at lunch with Franceska xxx and Rob van Kranenburg who both work with Internet of Things. It was nice. I had a sandwich.

I am now in the not-Mickey Mouse-bar (NMMB from now on), where I ran into Benjamin Henrion from FFII. I followed his tweets on the Nellie Kroes-hearing yesterday. She is the new Commissioner of DG Telecoms. He is dissatisfied with her view on patents. I am currently speaking with Maxime, from Trautmann's office. He seems not to be satisfied with the Kroes hearing either: she was too vague on telecoms market competition. Even as she has been good at coming down on near monopoly situations in the software (Microsoft cases) and telecommunications markets (Telefónica and BT), in the latter cases it hasn't made a lot of difference for the bad situations in Spain and the UK.

Spanish broadband prices still exceed the European average by some 12%. In the UK, the infrastructure is owned predominantly by BT which obviously gives them the power to control the conditions under which other service providers can act.

Kroes, he says, was vague on open standards, but for commercial net neutrality. It's not an optimal point of view, because another pressing issue is member state willingness to filter child pornography, sites on holocaust or jihad instigating pages. It is something we will have the change.

Yesterday I was with a journalist for the better part of the before-lunch. He was from Norwegian TV2 and was, I suppose, quite nice, even if his idea about parading in front of the parliament with a pirate flag was slightly daft. If you are a journalist and you're reading this, please don't suggest such a thing.

Currently, I'm in the not-Mickey Mouse-bar with Erik Josefsson and David Hammerstein, talking about trade agreements. The current issues predominantly concern the ACTA agreement, but we also have other problems in the Europe: the EU/South Korea trade agreement is not yet approved by the European parliament. It will have to be before it enters into force.

I wrote a couple of days ago about Erik Josefsson's new findings about the agreement's containing virtually all enforcement provisions from IPRED1. What does that mean?

Well, if the EU is bound by an international agreement, we can't change our legislation. So they're asking the parliament to give up their right to change essentially bad legislation. The problem is, as well, that they're not only limiting the power to change legislation as such, but also prohibiting the change of specific provisions in directives. So that's more intrusive than normal trade agreements which would mainly concern, say, tariff policies. Tariff policies can, and are, changed all the time.

This is a new and exciting day. I have been sitting in the "Mickey Mouse"-bar (because it looks like Mickey Mouse, although I have come to question that: it does not look like a Mickey Mouse head) at the European parliament talking to Marina Lähteenmaa and Björn Källström from Europaparlamentet i Sverige for a while about the Lisbon treaty and the ascension of the new MEPs into the European parliament. The questions are plentyful and the answers are none.

Basically:

I am not working in Brussels. I am currently in Brussels, inside the European Parliament, with an "accredited visitor's" badge, meaning that I formally need to be accompanied by staff wherever I go. That is, I'm actually just like any ordinary citizen with the fortune of knowing people inside the walls.

As of Saturday, I am in Brussels, and as of today I am an accredited visitor of Erik Josefsson's until the end of the week. In the parliament today I have accomplished an interview with Norwegian television. But more interesting is the diligent preparations going on all over for the hearing of the new Commissioners next week. I was at a meeting with the group experts of the Green group in the morning and they were discussing each Commissioner in turn.

After getting in touch with Henk Prummel I also realised that Nellie Kroes might not be so bad at leading DG Telecoms. I have previously been only cautiously optimistic, because while everyone has been talking about the Microsoft cases I've actually been more worried about what's been going on with say Telefonica cases or BT cases. I feel more at ease now, although it still irks me that the Swedish conservatives were so ready to accept lack of competition regulation as a one-size-fits-all solution. It's obviously not. Deregulation worked well in... Sweden. But hardly anywhere else.

The EU/Canada CETA currently under negotiation has been shown to hold many similarities, nay, "even copies of existing articles in European legislation.

On euwiki.org is listed in order articles from the EU-Canada CETA and corresponding articles from EU directives. The CETA Sub-Section 3 seems to be a direct copy-paste of the articles of the IPRED1 directive. They've just left out inter-member state bureaucracy coordination.

I'm guessing the Commission can argue that they're not acting legislators since European legislators have already decided that above mentioned directives and articles are A-OK. Michael Geist, however, writes that we're definitely exporting legislation alien to the Canadian legal system, and he ought to know.

An FTA was already signed between EU and South Korea, and the enforcement sections (allegedly IPRED1 articles) are more or less the same in both agreements. How was EU legislation passed in the Korean state?