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I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:
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Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing "materials not fully created and in existence." Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me. |
We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it's counterproductive to the United States' larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations -- not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.
Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, "mandate"-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.
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Cory Doctorow's reports for the Electronic Frontier Foundation from the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meeting in Geneva are fascinating for what they illuminate at this bizarre crossroads of global bureaucracy and globalized corporatocracy. But most peculiar of all is his tale of how "all of the handouts set out by the 'public interest' groups (e.g., us, civil society coalition, IP Justice, Union for the Public Domain) were repeatedly stolen and pitched into the trashcans in the bathrooms."
Here's an excerpt of the full saga:
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Let me try to convey to you the depth of the weirdness that arose when all the public-interest groups' papers were stolen and trashed at WIPO. No one gets into the WIPO building without being accredited and checked over, so this was almost certainly someone who was working on the treaty -- in other words, a political opponent (none of the documents promoting the Broadcast Treaty were touched).
As the Indian delegation put it, WIPO is an organization based on information. For someone who believes in an information-protection instrument like the Broadcast Treaty to sabotage the negotiation by hiding information from the delegates is bizarre. The people who run the table were shocked silly -- this has apparently never happened before at WIPO.
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