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A couple of days ago, WikiLeaks leaked a copy of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. This is interesting in its own right, of course, but it’s especially interesting because the draft copy specifies exactly which provisions the United States is fighting for and what positions other countries are taking. This means that if the US wins agreement for its demands, it will be a very public cave-in by most of the other negotiators. Needless to say, that makes caving in harder.
That said, what’s actually in the draft? Today, Henry Farrell talks to George Washington University professor Susan Sell about the chapter dealing with intellectual property (trademarks, copyrights, patents, etc.). Here’s an excerpt:
After Thursday’s leak of the intellectual property chapter it is obvious why the USTR and the Obama administration have insisted on secrecy. From this text it appears that the U.S. administration is negotiating for intellectual property provisions that it knows it could not achieve through an open democratic process. For example, it includes provisions similar to those of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that the European Parliament ultimately rejected….
People call it a Hollywood wish list — why?
Some provisions of the text resurrect pieces of SOPA and PIPA and ACTA that many found to be objectionable. The entertainment industries (movies and music) championed these agreements and sought stronger protections in the digital realm. These industries were stunned when SOPA and PIPA got killed. Only the United States and New Zealand oppose a provision that would require compensation for parties wrongfully accused of infringement (QQ.H.4). The United States is alone in proposing criminal procedures and penalties “even absent willful trademark, counterfeiting or copyright or related rights piracy”.
Only the United States and Australia oppose a provision limiting Internet Service Provider liability (QQ.I.1); U.S. copyright holders would like ISPs to be held liable for hosting infringing content. The United States also proposes extending copyright to life plus 95 years for corporate-owned copyrights. Hollywood consistently presses for longer copyright terms and it is doing so here.
Read the whole thing for more. It’s no surprise that the United States is pushing the hardest line on IP protections, but it is a little surprising that its line is so hard and that it’s apparently getting strong pushback from virtually every negotiating partner.
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Leaked Treaty Puts US Hard Line on Patents and Copyrights on Public Display
Mother Jones
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Video taken by YouTube user Fireezdragon
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) appeared at a town hall in a local library in East Baton Rouge Parish on Thursday, where he made some news by saying he favored a complete shutdown of the US government over funding Obamacare.
Near the end of the event, Vitter responded to a audience member’s criticism of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, with a comment of his own that veered awfully close to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” moment, when he said at a private fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were Obama-loving government mooches who won’t take responsibility for their lives.
Here’s what Vitter had to say in response to a questioner’s criticism of Obamacare:
The only thing I’d add is, I wish you were right that nobody wants Obamacare. That’s not true. And in fact, the other side, who absolutely wants it, most of whom are getting something for nothing, came out in droves for the last election and our side sat at home.
Vitter didn’t expand on what he meant by “getting something for nothing”—free health care? Free food? Free Obamaphones?—but the gist was clear enough. By “the other side,” he means Obamacare supporters and also those people, most of them Democrats, who voted for President Obama last November. These Obama backers, Vitter seems to say, are mostly deadbeats living off the government.
There’s been plenty written about how accusing Democrats of being government leeches, as Romney and now Vitter have, isn’t fair or accurate. These kinds of comments also ignore the fact that Republicans rely on the welfare state, too. A recent Bloomberg News analysis found that Romney won 213 of the 254 counties in the US where the number of food-stamp recipients doubled from 2007 to 2011.
In Louisiana alone, 914,196 people receive food stamps. That’s 20 percent of the state’s population. Does Sen. Vitter think all of those people are Obama-loving government mooches?
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Mother Jones
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Why did Nate Silver leave the New York Times? Public editor Margaret Sullivan thinks that part of the reason is that he was never fully accepted by the paper’s old guard:
I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that….His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”
….The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.
Even for those of us who are pretty cynical about political reporting, this is astonishing. If I were editor of the Times, I’d do whatever it took to find out who those three are, and then fire them instantly. Whoever they are, they shouldn’t be trusted to cover the pig races at a country fair, let alone write about politics for the most influential newspaper in the country.
At the same time, this tidbit from Politico about Silver’s decisionmaking process while he was weighing competing offers from the Times and ESPN worries me just a little:
Silver had told The Times that he wanted to expand to weather, economics and anyplace else at The Times that had statistics and numbers he could bring to life….Nate will appear on the air on ESPN and ABC, and will get “verticals,” or web hubs, devoted to a variety of new topics. He’s very interested in education, so there’s been a lot of conversation about that.
Silver has done a great job with sports and campaign polling. But these are fairly unique areas. In the case of sports, Silver has a lot of subject matter expertise to go along with his number crunching. In the case of campaign polling, you don’t really need that much. You can get by with a pretty pure data-driven approach to the whole thing.
But weather, economics, and education? I’m skeptical that you can just parachute into those fields and add a lot of value. They’re far more complex, are already heavily populated with sophisticated statistical modeling, and generally require some serious subject matter expertise in addition to raw number-crunching skill.
It’s possible that I’m just overreacting to a brief throwaway mention in the Politico piece. If all Silver is trying to do is improve on mainstream news reporting of number-heavy topics, that shouldn’t be too hard. Still, I’d hate to see the basic 538 model get naively overextended into anything that has lots of numbers attached to it. It’s one thing when bloggers (like me) throw up simple wonk-lite analyses of complex topics. After all, no one really takes us seriously as experts. But the 538 brand is all about expertise. It’s inherent in everything that appears there. I hope Silver is careful about what he takes on as he extends his brand.
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Nate Silver Didn’t "Fit In" at the Times Because….He Was Right Too Often?
