From Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr>  Tue Jul 10 22:10:08 2001
From: Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr> (Bernard Lang)
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 23:10:08 +0200
Subject: [Patents] The Hague convention
Message-ID: <20010710231008.A9138@margaux.inria.fr>


Just so that we do not forget it

Does anyone know the position his government is taking at the Hague convention.


----- Forwarded message from Peter Suber <peters@earlham.edu> -----

Approved-By:  Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date:         Tue, 10 Jul 2001 16:02:21 +0100
Reply-To: peters@earlham.edu
From: Peter Suber <peters@earlham.edu>
Subject:      [FOS] FOS Newsletter, 7/10/01
To: SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG

        Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
        July 10, 2001

.......
.......

Thoughts on the Hague Convention

In the last issue I wrote about the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and
Foreign Judgments, which would require signatory countries to enforce one
another's legal judgments.  While this would allow one country's copyright
judgments to be enforced world-wide, it would give the same reach to
censorship judgments.  This is an issue on which commerce and liberty
conflict, and unfortunately the treaty is being negotiated by delegates who
do not acknowledge the conflict and who seem to care much more about
commerce than liberty.

Case One:   A Chinese-American in New York writes a scholarly article
documenting repression in China.  China sues for subversion in a Chinese
court, wins, and gets the U.S. to enforce the judgment.  Case Two:  A
Chinese student in Beijing sells a pirated copy of Microsoft
Office.  Microsoft sues for copyright infringement in an American court,
wins, and gets China to enforce the judgment.  Today, neither scenario
could occur.  Under the Hague Convention, both could occur, and the
convention delegates are giving clear signals that they will tolerate the
first in order to get the second.

The scenarios are realistic in the sense that the U.S. and China are both
members of the drafting conference.  They are also realistic in the sense
that China just sentenced one writer, Liu Weifang, to three years in prison
for writing an online article critical of the Chinese Communist Party, and
just conducted a secret trial of another, Huang Qi, for putting information
about the Tiananmen Square massacre on his web site.
http://www.nando.net/technology/story/28874p-501592c.html (Liu Weifang story)
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=7&id=37941 (Huang Qi story)

I can't get this out of my head.  So without the excuse of breaking news
directly on the Hague Convention, here are some further thoughts.

Hegel said that history is the story of freedom.  The history of the
internet to date bears him out.  One of the major threads in the history of
internet has been the changing relationship between the most free nations
and the least free.  The internet allows users to engage in unregulated and
sometimes encrypted and anonymous acts of information sharing,
conversation, cooperation, and collaboration.  Citizens of the most free
countries can do this most freely, but even citizens of the least free
countries can do it better with the internet than without.  Where the
internet has reached, it has been liberating.  The problem with the draft
Hague Convention in a nutshell is that it not only halts these liberating
tendencies but reverses them.  Under the Hague Convention, the least free
nations could halt the influx of unwelcome content and could export their
censorship and oppression to the most free nations.

All that China, Iran, Libya, or Afganistan need to stop unwelcome content,
and export censorship, is the authority to bring effective legal action
against authors and publishers in other countries.  This is exactly what
the Hague Convention gives them.

Until now the internet raised the standard of freedom around the world,
requiring the least free nations to cope with uncensored expression
crossing their borders and occasionally arising from within its
borders.  The Hague Convention will lower the standard of freedom around
the world, requiring the most free nations to cope with despotic legal
judgments crossing their borders and a treaty obligation to give them
effect.  Until now, the least free nations were on the defensive; after the
convention, the most free nations will be on the defensive.

What's worse, the obligation to enforce freedom-curtailing legal verdicts
will be self-imposed.  Citizens in the most free nations will not only have
to fight back against their new legal liabilities to foreign governments,
but against their own governments who think that world-wide enforcement of
censorship and intimidation is a price worth paying for world-wide
enforcement of copyrights.

The internet crosses national borders, but then so did print
publications.  Once a nation accepts telephone service, however, it is
easier for it to keep proscribed print publications from crossing its
borders than it is to exclude internet content.  That's why the internet
has been liberating.  But that's also why we cannot return to the days of
merely national jurisdiction over freedom of speech.  Something has to
give:  either the protections for free speech in the most free nations or
the censorship rules in the least free nations.  Multiculturalists can ask
which group deserves to prevail.  But scholars who require academic freedom
require the freedom of the internet.

Of all the supposed threats to the internet --viruses, denial of service
attacks, the rise of advertising, the fall of advertising, skittish venture
capital, Microsoft's monopoly, government eavesdropping, commercial
eavesdropping-- the Hague Convention the most ominous.  Yet it is barely
being discussed.

I'm repeating the links on the Hague Convention from the last issue so you
don't have to look them up.  Use them to spread the word.  I particularly
recommend the CPT page.

Lisa Bowman, Global treaty--threat to the Net?
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5093109,00.html
 From _ZD Net News_

Boris Grondahl, Your Court Or Mine?
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27176,00.html
 From _The Industry Standard_

CPT page on the Hague Convention (many links to documents and critics)
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/hague.html
 From the Consumer Project on Technology (CPT)

Members of the U.S. delegation to the Hague Convention
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/haguecontact.html#us
 From CPT

Hague Convention home page (not up to date)
http://www.hcch.net/e/workprog/jdgm.html

* And here are a couple of new links.

Letter from Fred Weingarten and Miriam M. Nisbet of the American Library
Assocation, to Jeffrey Kovar, head of the US delegation to the Hague
Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/hague-jur-commercial-law/2001-June/000048.html

Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), Resolution on the proposed Hague
Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments
http://www.tacd.org/cgi-bin/db.cgi?page=view&config=admin/docs.cfg&id=94

James Love, Hague Diplomatic Conference Ends, Badly For Now
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/badly.html

Richard Stallman, Harm from the Hague
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/hague.html

Tom Vogt, Harassment from the Hague
http://web.lemuria.org/DeCSS/hague.html


----------


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This is the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter (ISSN 1535-7848).

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