Draft FTAA treaty's intellectual property provisions

From: "Tom A. Trottier" <Tom _-at-_ Abacurial.com>
To: "Catherine DICKSON - FTAA Intellectual Property Officer" <FTAA.ZLEA (at) dfait-maeci.gc.ca>
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 23:46:19 -0400

Dear Ms Dickson,

I write to express my grave concern regarding the draft FTAA treaty's 
extreme intellectual property provisions. These measures, based on 
the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much 
power to publishers, at the expense of indivduals' rights. The DMCA 
itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has gravely 
chilled scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of 
expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US, 
and resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer. 

The FTAA provisions, which serve no one but American corporate 
copyright interests, are even more over-reaching than those of the 
DMCA. These provisions would require signatory nations to pass new 
DMCA- style laws that ban, with few or no exceptions, software and 
other tools that allow copy prevention technologies to be bypassed. 

This would violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of freedom of 
speech under the First Amendment, and similar guarantees in other 
national constitutions and laws and in the UN Universal Declaration 
of Human Rights, since such tools are necessary to exercise lawful 
uses, including fair use, reverse engineering, computer security 
research and many others. 

I urge you to remove these controversial and anti-freedom provisions 
from the FTAA treaty language. The DMCA is already an international 
debacle. Its flaws - and worse - should not be exported and forced on 
other countries. 

Tom   Trottier

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