New Rules for Global Justice by Scholte Jan Aart;Fioramonti Lorenzo;Nhema Alfred G.;

Author:Scholte, Jan Aart;Fioramonti, Lorenzo;Nhema, Alfred G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model

Chapter 8

Copyfight

Global Redistribution in the Digital Age

Blayne Haggart

Of all the issues affecting economic and social inequality discussed in this book – finance, food sovereignty, climate change, to mention only a few – copyright may seem like a marginal subject. However, as this chapter will argue, copyright, particularly as it relates to online activities, is one of the main structures shaping the distribution of wealth and access to know-ledge and culture in the twenty-first century.

Citizens around the world have grasped the importance of this issue, transforming a previously neglected area of commercial law into one of the most surprisingly politicized issues of the past decade, capable of mobilizing millions into action. On 18 January 2012, thousands of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, stopped operating (‘went dark’) in an act of voluntary self-censorship to protest against the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that aimed to achieve stronger copyright enforcement and that opponents believed could ‘break the Internet’ (Hruska 2011). Consequently, millions of Americans contacted their elected representatives in Washington to express displeasure over SOPA. Within a day, the bill was effectively dead, marking the largest defeat of the ‘copyright industries’ in thirty years (Sell 2013, 67). Thanks to the efforts of ‘a transnational coalition of engineers, academics, hackers, technology companies, bloggers, consumer activists, and Internet users’ (Sell 2013, 67), copyright was transformed overnight into a politically poisonous topic in the USA.

This was not an online-only issue, the purview of millennial ‘slacktivists’. Less than a month after the SOPA protests, on 11 February 2012, over 100,000 Europeans took to the streets to protest an intellectual property (IP) agreement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was being negotiated largely in secret and was designed, among other things, to ratchet up enforcement of copyright on the Internet (Arthur and agencies 2012b). Critics contended that ACTA would have severe effects on everything from freedom of expression and privacy rights to online innovation (Carrier 2013; Amnesty International 2012). Although the European Union and many of its members have signed the treaty, ACTA has become so unpopular that it is unlikely to be ratified (Arthur and agencies 2012a).

Nor is digital copyright a preoccupation only for the Global North. Even before the SOPA protests, in July 2011, the Mexican Senate – a body that less than a decade earlier had voted overwhelmingly to extend the term of copyright to a world-leading life of the author plus hundred years – unanimously voted to reject ACTA. Mexico was one of only two developing countries (Morocco being the other) invited to the talks. Over the course of a year, a small group of activists, leveraging social media, key Senate contacts, and a keen understanding of the issue and Mexican politics, managed to orchestrate this policy turnaround. The final Senate resolution condemned the secrecy of the talks and expressed concern about how ACTA’s stronger enforcement of digital copyright could negatively affect constitutionally guaranteed rights, Mexican economic development, and the ‘digital divide’ (Haggart 2014a; see also Haggart 2014b).

The scale and passion

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