Obama Just Doesn’t Understand — Prez Still Mum On Copyright Treaty

DALLAS, Texas Sharing. It’s what our parents told us to do with our toys when the neighbor kids were visiting.

But to the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and the United States, forget about it.

They obviously had different parents.

Obviously, only because they haven’t told anybody about the super-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) since first meeting to discuss it in 2006.

The ACTA would in effect criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, even of intellectual property that has been purchased legally prior to said sharing over the Internet.

And all of this negotiating for it has been done behind closed doors with armed guards standing outside.

To the nerds that already knew about these secret meetings, however, President Barack Obama’s trade representative Ron Kirk in early April threw a bone that “reflects the Obama Administration’s commitment to transparency.”

Transparency under the Obama administration has been pretty much the same as transparency under the Bush administration since neither one has divulged the details of the ACTA; Bush just denied their release on “national security” grounds, though world officials have had access to private lobbyists who have drafted ACTA proposals.

Obama, carrying over Bush’s reasoning grounds, released his “detailed summary” only after Kirk’s appointment.

Knowledge Ecology International’s Freedom of Information Act request was denied in March after the intellectual-property research and advocacy group filed it in January thinking Obama’s presidency would be more transparent than Bush’s.

Still, as a frustrated Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica.com put it, the details in Kirk’s summary were “maddeningly few.”

“So what we get instead is a six-page outline of the issues that ACTA will cover, but stripped of any specific ideas that are being pushed in the negotiations,” he wrote. “While the list of issues is interesting to glance over, only ACTA’s approaches to those issues matter, and the document gives little hint about how things are shaping up.”

According to the Obama administration, the details were thin because the trade negotiations are in the early stages and to release any texts would jeopardize them and their good faith.

“A comprehensive set of proposals for the text of the agreement does not yet exist,” Kirk’s statement said.

Indeed, what the world knows of ACTA before leaked drafts of it were published by WikiLeaks.

The idea that governments will scan their borders for music downloaded illegally on citizens’ iPods has made the European Union categorically denounce this intention.

“EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons, or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an i-Pod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this,” the EU said.

According to Kirk’s summary, the ACTA discussions revolve around information piracy that prioritizes comm