Last month, U.S. trade lobbyist Scotty Greenwood urged Canadians to enact U.S.-style copyright reforms, arguing that progress on that issue would result in movement on the "Buy American" provisions that have cropped up in the United States. I pointed to a post from Blayne Haggart explaining why the link was false. Now David Jacobson, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, has confirmed that there is no linkage. Jacobson notes that while the U.S. will obviously continue to pressure Canada on copyright, there is no link between the two issues:
As for whether if only we could solve intellectual property rights, then Buy American would go away, I do not agree with that. They are two separate issues and stand on their own. We are very concerned about intellectual property laws in Canada. We don’t think they are in the best interest of Canadians or Americans, but that is a separate issue that we have not linked.
Hunh?
And yet they link copyright to sugar in Costa Rica.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4697/125/
I can’t think of a single reason to trust a single word that man says about anything.
Secret copyright treaty debated in DC: must-see video
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/15/secret-copyright-tre-2.html
Cory Doctorow writes: “Last month, Google’s DC office hosted a public debate on ACTA, with Steven J. Metalitz, a lawyer and lobbyist representing the International Intellectual Property Alliance; Jamie Love, an activist with Knowledge Ecology International; Jonathan Band, a lawyer representing a coalition of library groups and a variety of tech and Internet companies and Ryan Clough from Silicon Valley Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren’s office; moderated by Washington Post consumer technology columnist Rob Pegoraro.”
“The video runs to 90 minutes. I don’t get a lot of 90-minute chunks of time in my life, but I made time for this. It was one of the most spirited — even heated — debates I’ve heard on the subject, and it got into substantive questions of law, jurisdiction, economics and ethics.”
Actually, I agree with the ambassador for a change
Both foreign copyright reform and “Buy American” are pandering to special interests in the US. The special interests for “Buy American” includes both the manufacturing and organized labour interests. Linking copyright reforms to other treaties is pandering to the IP and entertainment special interests.
If Scotty Greenwood really believed that copyright reform would loosen the “Buy American” restrictions in the US, I want to know what he is smoking. On the other hand, he was more probably spreading misinformation.