US's 'Naughty List' Of Countries Whose Intellectual Property Rules We Don't Like Is A Joke That's No Longer Funny

Posted by BernardSwiss on Feb 13, 2015 4:52 PM EDT
Techdirt; By Mike Masnick
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The clearest example of what a joke the 301 process is came two years ago, when CCIA tried to use the "process" behind the list to get Germany put on the list for attacking fair use. That actually seemed like a perfectly good use of the list, as Germany was trying to force search engines (mainly Google) to pay up for posting snippets of news and linking to them (a plan that it has continued to push). Here was a clear case of abusing copyright law to harm an American company. And the USTR totally ignored it. Because the Special 301 process is not about saner intellectual property laws. It's about making intellectual property maximalists happy. That's why some of those maximalists have even used the process to get countries declared naughty for merely using open source software.

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