Many readers are probably familiar with the Antigua-U.S. Gambling dispute. I don't want to go through all the details here, but if you need a refresher, here's an overview from an ASIL Insight I did in 2008.
I hadn't heard anything about the case recently and had been wondering what was going. Well, here's an interesting development: An Antiguan company claims that, based on the WTO ruling, it is allowed to violate U.S. intellectual property rights as part of a music and movie download service it has set up! Specifically, it is selling these downloads at very low prices, presumably possible because it is not paying for the rights.
I don't mean to encourage this sort of thing by linking to the site, but it's here if you want to check it out. On its About page, the company says:
ZookZ operates under the parameters of the 2007 WTO ruling between Antigua and the United States, and is the only website that can legally offer members unlimited digital entertainment.
I read about this first at TechDirt, which had this to say:
... it doesn't seem like the WTO ruling gave random private companies carte blanche to offer up music and movies. In fact, the Zookz interpretation gets even odder, where it interprets the $21 million to mean how much it can make, rather than the value "lost" to the industry. In fact, because of this Zookz claims that if it gets too close to selling $21 million (or if others enter the market, and combined they approach $21 million), they'll just have to start giving music and movies away for free to avoid going over the limit. While the WTO did want to give Antigua a weapon against the US, it's hard to believe that was what it meant. So, while this may be amusing to watch, the likelihood of Zookz lasting very long seems slim, at best.
TechDirt got the story from the LA Times, which had some interesting back and forth between the parties involved:
Copyright holders say the WTO ruling doesn't give companies in Antigua a free pass to violate the copyright laws of Antigua or any other nation, or other international copyright treaties that Antigua has agreed to. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative contended in an e-mail, “There is no website anywhere in the world that has WTO authorization to engage in copyright piracy. Any representation to the contrary is false, and should be dealt with by the appropriate domestic authorities.”
It's not clear what, in fact, the ruling would let Antiguan firms do. According to Neil Turkewitz, an executive vice president at the RIAA who specializes in international issues, the first step would be for the government of Antigua to seek the WTO's approval for a method to impose the $21 million worth of sanctions. "There’s been no request, and there’s been no consent granted to proceed in this manner," Turkewitz said. And even if the WTO did permit a downloading service, he said, it would have to be confined to Antigua and limited to U.S. intellectual property. No Beatles songs, in other words.
That's a total misreading of the WTO's ruling, argued William Pepper, the company's legal counsel. "There is no burden on Antigua to go back and do anything with anyone," he said in an interview. He claimed that the ruling is much more expansive than the USTR or Turkewitz acknowledge, trumping all other intellectual property laws and agreements and imposing no limits on where Antiguan firms can do business online. The only restriction set by the WTO, he said, is that companies in Antigua can take in no more than $21 million a year through the sale of copyrighted material. Zookz is the only one so far, he said, but if others launch, they'll have to work together to observe that limit. And if Zookz nears the $21-million threshold on its own, Pepper said, it may have to start giving away movies and music.
...
Naturally, the MPAA doesn't see Zookz as a modern-day Robin Hood. Said spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman in an e-mail, "The suspension of intellectual property rights is not an action this pirate Website can undertake on its own. It is, pure and simple, another example of a movie pirate, stealing movies from creators, and attempting to profit from its theft."
All in all, this has been one of the most interesting WTO disputes ever, and it seems there is still more excitement to come!
ADDED: Now that I think about it, here was a better title for this post: "Taking WTO Law Into Your Own Hands!"
