Sex, Youth and ACTA

[Disclosure: The Amazon links in this story may earn me enough money in book tokens over the next several years to purchase a well-thumbed copy of The Kama Sutra]

I’ll admit I couldn’t finish Peter F. Hamilton’s execrable book Misspent Youth. Like I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, it presents the idea that an elderly man can be rejuvenated, and explores the consequences of this rejuvenation. In Heinlein’s case the return to youth is achieved by hacking off the patient’s head, scooping out the brain and sticking it in the head of a young, beautiful woman – the patient’s secretary as it happens. My favourite bit about Heinlein’s version is the doctor’s “explanation” for how it all works: apparently you can just glue the two spinal columns together and somehow the nerves just work it all out. Wow! In Hamilton’s case, there’s a lengthy hospitalisation during which various things are done to the patient to rejuvenate tissues. Boringly, there’s no head-hacking-off, and no body-snatching.

In both books however, “exploring the consequences of this rejuvenation” seems to consist of the recent rejuvenate and his youthful peers alternately whinging, fucking and then whinging about the fucking for hundreds of pages. Being in your twenties, it seems, is just not that interesting. As Glenn Robbins once remarked, “When I was in my twenties, I spent most of my time wandering around, scratching my arse and bumping into things.” But perhaps this area of writing about yoof is just a little fraught. Even my once favourite author, Vernor Vinge, managed to jump the shark with the annoyingly un-apostrophised Rainbows End which also featured Young People Having a Bit of a Whine About Stuff, and which I also consigned (in hardback) to the rubbish bin after a hundred pages. Which was tough, because his earlier books A Fire Upon The Deep and Across Realtime were truly excellent.

All that aside however, one of the futurisms in Misspent Youth relates to technology defeating intellectual property. Supposedly a method is invented of cheaply storing massive amounts of information at great density, and this leads to a collapse of copyright and intellectual property because of the incredible ease with which content can be copied and illegally distributed. Once profitable auteurs are featured reminiscing about the time when they could make money from their craft, and the great films, novels, albums and images are all firmly in the past.

It seems this is the future feared by those responsible for ACTA (the secret international copyright treaty currently in negotiation). So much do they fear it, apparently, that they are prepared to embody in a treaty the right for border guards to search your iPod for illegally copied material. If a traveller is suspected of carrying illegal drugs, so goes the reasoning, then we allow our border guards to perform a body cavity search. Why not a similar, far less intrusive measure for travellers suspected of carrying illegal music? Seem reasonable? Well, it might seem reasonable to, say, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair, or any other person of consequence who in the last decade has spent thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars dismantling our personal freedoms and our human rights in the name of fear.

And so could it have been but for the publicity being created around the secrecy of the ACTA process by people such as Michael Geist and Cory Doctorow. That publicity led to an apparent mad scramble on the part of the treaty participants to avoid caving in wholesale to the demands of the copyright industry. As Geist notes:

The leak of the full consolidated ACTA text will provide anyone interested in the treaty with plenty to work with for the next few weeks.  While several chapters have already been leaked and discussed… the consolidated chapter provides a clear indication of how the negotiations have altered earlier proposals… as well as the first look at several other ACTA elements.

For example, last spring it was revealed that several countries had proposed including a de minimis provision to counter fears that the border measures chapter would lead to iPod searching border guards.  This leak shows there are four proposals on the table.

The revisions are principally about the exclusion of “goods of a non-commercial nature” and “goods in quantities reasonably attributable to the personal use of the traveler”. Similarly, in other sections, reference is made explicitly to “copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale”.

Doctorow mentions his continuing concern:

…every time I cross the US or Canadian border, they tell me my laptop is “commercial goods” because I do business with it.

but I think this is possibly a bit wide of the mark. He ought to be immensely satisfied with the results of his campaign to publicise the single greatest element of concern around these ACTA negotiations: their secrecy. Without that campaign, it’s unlikely any waterings-down would have been included in this latest draft, and the world would awaken one ugly morning to the news of the arrest and detention of a teenager in New York, Paris, London or Tokyo trying to smuggle an MP3 player full of Rick Astley songs through border control.

Certainly it is wrong that these ACTA negotiations are taking place in secret. But is it wrong that there be an attempt to improve global treaties on the protection of intellectual property rights? Do we really want a world where it is not possible to aggregate sufficient royalties to sustain a business? Do we want a world where all content creators are forced to fund their work through advertising, and to develop content correspondingly cheaper? Do we want a world where product placements are more vital to the movie industry’s revenues than box office takings, where…

Oh. Right.