If you think that the excesses of the credit card companies are limited to the United States, think again. In search of new business, the companies have expanded worldwide into cultures where debt had been a stigma. From the story The Debt Trap: Outside U.S., Credit Cards Tighten Grip appearing in Sunday's New York Times:

[Turkey:] As the American blessing of credit cards became widespread, so did the American curse of debt. Outstanding card debt here ballooned to nearly $18 billion last year, six times the level five years earlier. [...]By 2001, Mr. Uzel was deep in debt. Earning the equivalent of $4,360 a year, he had nearly $6,000 in unpaid balances on five credit cards. Seven years later, after borrowing from family, friends and even his boss to meet payments, he finally paid off his cards. “My best years as a young man have been wasted,” said Mr. Uzel, 32, fingering a set of worry beads. “I haven’t had a social life for 10 years. I’ve given the last penny in my pocket to the banks.”

In Turkey, change was prompted by a grim statistic. From 2003 to 2006, consumer groups said, 41 people died because of credit card debt, either through suicide or homicide.

According to today's New York Times story Accounting Plan Would Allow Use of Foreign Rules, by Steve LaBaton, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is preparing rules changes that would allow U.S. companies to choose to be regulated under either international or U.S. standards. If adopted, the proposals would weaken investor protections. As the story points out:

James D. Cox, a securities law expert at Duke Law School who returned this week from teaching corporate law in Europe, said the shift to international rules amounted to "outsourcing safety standards." "We would not for a moment tolerate having American auto safety standards set by China or India," he said. "Why should we do it for financial safety standards? There has to be some accountability."

U.S. accounting rules, including a number of post-Enron, post-WorldCom (old enough to remember those debacles just 6 years ago?) investor protection reforms enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Reform Act of 2002, are so-called "rules-based" standards, while generally more permissive international rules are known as "principles- based" standards. Proponents of weakening U.S. law have used a variety of "apples-to-oranges" and, worse, deceptive arguments to claim that U.S. capital markets are both in the tank and in that tank because of the heavy hand of U.S. regulation. Yet as the the state and provincial securities cops (known as the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), point out:

U.S. Markets Remain a Magnet for Capital

The cornerstone of the principles argument -- a claim of decreased foreign IPOs on U.S. markets -- is questionable, at best. In 2007, U.S. IPOs reached a record high, not seen since the year 2000, bringing in $54 billion, and including a large number of foreign IPOs from China.

Claims that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has driven away foreign companies that are unfounded. Currently, record IPO numbers in themselves argue against this claim. SOX is revered worldwide and SOX-inspired legislation has appeared in several foreign regimes, following the U.S.'s lead.

Foreign investors, counter to popular argument, are indeed drawn to U.S. listings due to the low cost of capital, high financial returns and premiums on home-market listings, and the fact that U.S. markets serve as a proving ground for foreign companies, which must demonstrate to investors and the financial community that they meet the U.S.'s high standards of investor protection and financial integrity.

The S.E.C. also plans to announce details of a pilot program that would enable foreign brokers to deal directly with American investors, while continuing to be largely regulated by the foreign country. The first country in the program will be Australia, although officials hope to eventually include other countries.

Most presidents are free traders, to a fault. The last three presidents (both the President Bushes and President Clinton) are among those who have broadly sought expanded trade authority while settling for little Congressional oversight and less, if any at all, protection for workers, consumers or the environment (remember NAFTA, Fast track, WTO, etc.?) Worse, the slew of so-called bi-lateral (CAFTA, FTAA, etc.) trade agreements that have been ratified in the past few years have included numerous provisions inserted at the behest of U.S. drug companies and other powerful special interests.

Now, there is a fair trade alternative. From Public Citizen's release last week:

Following a presidential primary season highlighting broad public concern about current trade policies, the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act introduced today by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine) reveals a way forward to a new trade and globalization agenda that could benefit more Americans, said Public Citizen. The bill is supported by a broad array of labor, consumer, environmental, family farm and faith groups and more than 50 House and Senate original cosponsors. "The TRADE Act is exciting because it describes concretely new trade and globalization policies that many Americans would support and shifts the debate toward future consensus about what we are for, rather than focusing on opposition to the current model," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division. [...]"Corporate interests have hijacked past trade pacts to get special protections -- patent extensions that jack up drug prices, subsidies for offshoring production and more.

Two weeks ago, the DC-based WJLA-TV I-team led by veteran investigative reporter Roberta Baskin did a story asking the question: "How does Whole Foods know that the Chinese products it brands organic really are organic and pesticide-free?" One of those products says "California Blend" in large type on the front and "Product of China" in small type on the back. This story is well worth a look.

A federal judge has ruled (AP story) that Jamie Leigh Jones, who was allegedly drugged and gang-raped by fellow Halliburton/KBR contractors at Camp Hope in Baghdad, "can take her claims to trial" rather than, as Halliburton lawyers claimed her employment contract required, going through often-biased third-party arbitration. Our previous blog on Jones' plight. Our previous blog on arbitration reform.

In an unrelated AP story today Defense contractor creates a Caribbean tax haven on how government contractors including KBR use off-shore tax havens to avoid paying income and even payroll taxes, U.S. PIRG staff attorney John Krieger notes the practice is both unpatriotic and unfair to employees:

Krieger ... said companies with overseas outposts have lower overall expenses and therefore an unfair advantage when competing for work against American businesses that don't. "It's purely disgraceful for them to pretend to be foreign companies to avoid their very basic responsibilities like Medicare and Social Security," Krieger says. "The whole spirit of open competition has been completely lost."

In 1998, U.S. and European consumer groups, with a lot of support from the European Commission and some support from the U.S. government, formed the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue to engage the European Union and U.S. governments on key issues of concern-- including, among others, privacy, genetically-modified food (GMOs), chemical safety and toxics, and access to knowledge and medicine. TACD is holding its ninth meeting of members here in Washington April 5-8. We hold internal meetings over the weekend, meet with the governments Monday, and hold a side conference Generation Excess III Tuesday to discuss obesity strategies. Monday and Tuesday are open to the public and the media. Key participants include Ambassador John Bruton, Head of the European Commission Delegation to the U.S.A and the new Chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, William E. Kovacic. Agenda is here (Word download). At the website, you can find a number of platform documents on our work on the listed and other important consumer issues.

Leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee have announced a compromise on major CPSC reform legislation approved in committee last fall. The committee's lead Republican, co-chairman and Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), has signed off on a modified version of S. 2045, the CPSC Reform Act sponsored by Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR), Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and others. There is no word yet on whether the deal guarantees that all Senators will consent to bringing the bill to the floor without pernicious delays common to the Senate under its rules, but this is a major step. Our hope is to enact final legislation that melds the best parts of the House-passed bill, HR 4040, with the Senate bill, and even improves them where they are lacking.

Also this week, I am speaking both today and Thursday at the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization annual conference. Other speakers include Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), lead sponsor of HR 4040, CPSC acting chair Nancy Nord and key hill staff. The event committee is chaired by Rachel Weintraub of the Consumer Federation of America.

Finally, our colleagues at Kids In Danger have released an important report called 2007: The Year of the Recall. Check it out:

There were 231 recalls accounting for more than 46 million items, including twelve recalls that involved one million or more units. "These products together caused at least 657 injuries and 6 deaths," stated Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids In Danger. " And those incidents include only those already reported at the time of the recall. More needs to be done to protect children from these hazards."

The Wall Street Journal story False 'Green' Ads Draw Global Scrutiny (pd. subs. may be req'd) by Tom Wright notes that government agencies and even notoriously cautious industry self-regulatory bodies are stepping up efforts against greenwashing-- the practice of falsely claiming in ads that your polluting product is good for the Earth:

In Norway, government regulators in September banned all car ads from stating that their vehicles are "green," "clean" or "environmentally friendly" on the grounds that all car production leads to more, not fewer, carbon emissions. The Belgian industry-run, advertising-standard authority in October ruled that Swedish auto maker Saab Automobile, a unit of General Motors Corp., must pull a print campaign in which it claimed that its "Biopower" range of cars make the roads "finally turn green."

Carbon offsets fund projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in one place in order to counterbalance or "offset" emissions that occur elsewhere.

We testify this afternoon at a hearing of a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee subcommittee on major legislation, the CPSC Reform Act of 2007, S. 2045. The bill has the potential, if improved in a few ways and not watered down in others, to go a long way toward:

The bill is introduced by subcommittee chair Mark Pryor (D-AR), a former state attorney general, along with full committee chair Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and the Senate's #2 leader, Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), as well as committee members Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Bill Nelson (D-FL). Watch on the Internet at 2:30pm.

Today's blog posts were not made in the middle of the night. My computer is still on DC time but I am in Geneva, Switzerland at the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue conference on "The Reform of WIPO: Implementing the Development Agenda."

The conference aims to help frame issues important to civil society stakeholders, not merely limited to multinational rights-holding corporations (drug companies, publishers, etc.) but also consumers in both north and, especially, south (often called developing countries), as the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reviews and implements proposals for WIPO's development agenda. The issues are explained well here by IPJustice.

In mid-September 2004 the TACD hosted the first Future of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Meeting in Geneva. That meeting brought together leading experts and stakeholders from academia, industry, NGOs, and governments, as well as members of the WIPO secretariat, to discuss the future of this United Nations Agency. In short, those gathered then examined what the mission of WIPO was and what it ought to be. At that years' WIPO General Assembly, in response to a proposal by Argentina and Brazil co-sponsored by 12 other developing countries and spurred on by the discussions at the said TACD meeting among other events, WIPO Member States decided to examine proposals on establishing a development agenda for WIPO. These proposals will be considered by the full WIPO beginning next week. We hope that the conference provides additional guidance to the WIPO and other governmental attendees.

[Update: A few hours later-- I used the term "largely" because the court had disagreed with a few minor points made by the commission regarding its legal fees and ongoing costs to monitor compliance, but to be clear: the media are recording this as a "resounding" or "decisive" or "major" "defeat" or "rebuke." Microsoft is expected to take a hit in the markets today and, then, in overall market share in Europe.]

In a closely watched decision, a European court has largely upheld actions in 2004 by European Commission antitrust and competition enforcers against Microsoft for abusing its "dominant position" regarding both the interoperability of Windows and the bundling of Windows Media Player. I expect our European consumer colleagues at BEUC may issue a statement shortly. Here is the story in the International Herald Tribune.

On Monday, I will participate in an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, sponsored by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (tacd.org). The conference concerns the activities of the powerful, but obscure, UN agency known as the World Intellectual Property Organization. The Reform of WIPO: Implementing the Development Agenda will examine WIPO's well-known potential to make access to medicine and access to knowledge more affordable for billions of citizens across the globe. The question has always been: But does WIPO have the political will? The event is one in a series of TACD conferences on reforming intellectual property laws.

I'll be on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, Wednesday morning, (airing from 10-11 am in the DC market, at least, but I don't know about times nationwide so check your local listings) joining other guests and all discussing Mattel, China, dangerous toys and the CPSC.

Papers (New York Times) are reporting that "Zhang Shuhong, a Hong Kong businessman and owner of the Lee Der Industrial Company," has committed suicide. Lee Der is the firm implicated in the recent Fisher-Price lead paint recall of over a million toys. The Times, and others report that there is "no independent confirmation" of the suicide. Our previous blog.

In news releases, leading advocates for low-cost AIDS drugs and other medicines for lesser-developed countries, including Knowledge Ecology International and Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), have praised the Republic of India's High Court in Chennai for ruling against a Novartis patent claim, thereby allowing lower-cost Indian generic equivalents to continue to be sold without royalties. From KEI:

Novartis is complaining that the decision today will undermine R&D by claiming that it needs strong patent protection in India for R&D. India has more poor people than the combined population of Europe and the United States. We cannot depend on high drug prices in poor countries to stimulate R&D.

According to Setback for Novartis in India Over Drug Patent in today's New York Times,

Yusuf Hamied, chairman of the Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla, also described it as a positive ruling. "If Novartis had won, this would have been a tremendous setback for us," he said. "I am willing to pay a royalty on a new invention, but I am against monopolies. This would have increased monopolies, which would have meant higher prices."

From MSF:

Developing country governments and international agencies like UNICEF and the Clinton Foundation rely heavily on importing affordable drugs from India, and 84% of the antiretrovirals that MSF prescribes to its patients worldwide come from Indian generic companies. India must be allowed to remain the 'pharmacy of the developing world.'

U.S. PIRG, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America have sent a letter to Congressional leaders and the Bush administration outlining actions that must be taken to guarantee the safety of consumer products and food. The proposals would apply to all products, but new protections are proposed for imports:

Clearly, the system of effectively protecting consumers from dangerous and toxic foods and products is broken. [...] We ask that you act quickly to provide more resources and tools to the federal agencies charged with policing the safety of the nation's product and food supply. In addition, we must put mechanisms in place to hold companies accountable for the products they import and sell in the United States including requiring independent third party testing and certification of consumer products.

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law has asked Canadian competition authorities to undertake a similar review of the Google/DoubleClick merger as we and others have requested of the U.S. FTC:

In an application to the Competition Bureau, CIPPIC requests areview of the proposed merger between Google and DoubleClick. CIPPIC is concerned that the merger prevents or lessens competition substantially in the online targeted advertising market, as Google-DoubleClick will be able to manipulate the market to raise advertising prices and advertisers and web publishers will have to choose Google-DoubleClick in order to be visible in the e-commerce market.

Donald Mays, a senior official at Consumers Union and Consumer Reports, was among the witnesses at a Senate Commerce hearing on China and product and food safety. The committee should post testimony for all witnesses soon. At the hearing, Mays unveiled an 8 point Consumers Union/Consumer Federation of America import safety plan:

The consumer groups propose pre-shipment inspections and testing, creating a U.S.-based certification program for products and a traceability program for food, products, and all components and ingredients in order to hold producers, importers, distributors, and retailers, more accountable. The groups also endorse requiring importers to post bonds to ensure sufficient resources are available should a recall of a product be necessary. The action plan includes giving all government watchdog agencies mandatory recall authority, the power to levy meaningful civil penalties and requiring safety investigations to be publicly disclosed.

As I had mentioned, we are in Brussels for consumer meetings. Today we have had an all day conference on RFID spychips. Yesterday was the 8th Annual Meeting of the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue, where I was privileged to provide the plenary response to keynote remarks by both U.S. Ambassador to the European Union C. Boyden Gray and the new European Commissioner for Consumer Protection Meglena Kuneva [The picture at top left is me on left, moderator Klaske de Jonge of the Dutch consumer organization Consumentenbond and the Ambassador and the picture at right is Commissioner Kuneva, with me again.]

The European Commission, as does the U.S. system, divides roles for consumer protection among a variety of agencies. However, Commissioner Kuneva has been appointed to a newly-created commissionership. She has some authority parallel to that of part of the FTC and all of the authority of the CPSC (and some other authority, too). But, importantly she also has been given newly specific authority and responsibility as the European Union's chief consumer advocate and protector. This is certainly a European idea that could be imported into the U.S.-- establishing a government consumer advocate. Think about it. Who does speak for the consumer in the U.S. system? We have a lot of regulators, but if you asked anyone to name the nation's chief consumer advocate in government, there isn't one. We wish Commissioner Kuneva well and hope to work closely with her. Here is a link to Commissioner Kuneva's speech to the TACD. I couldn't find a copy of the Ambassador's remarks on his website, but this previous post includes a number of links on the Ambassador's and the U.S. government's lobbying against the European chemical safety proposal known as REACH. His remarks were similar.

If I get a chance I will add some footnotes to my own remarks.

I am in Brussels for the 8th Annual Meeting of the TransAtlantic Consumers Dialogue. The TACD is a forum that allows leading consumer advocacy groups of the U.S. and Europe to regularly consult with senior officials of the European Union and U.S. governments on a variety of important matters. The organization was established to balance the influence of the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue.

On Monday, I am scheduled to provide the TACD response to plenary session remarks by U.S. Ambassador C. Boyden Gray (US EU Mission bio page). The ambassador is a strong proponent and architect (Sourcewatch article) of the Bush administration's push for weaker consumer and environmental laws , including its strident opposition to the PIRG-backed European chemical safety law known as REACH (PIRG comments on REACH, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) report The Chemical Industry, the Bush Administration, and European Efforts to Regulate Chemicals documenting U.S. opposition efforts, recent Gray speech and WSJ op-edit on REACH, TACD REACH platform).

The ambassador will likely also discuss the notion of regulatory cooperation, which has the potential to help consumers and businesses, but at its worst is a vehicle for mutual deregulation. Here's TACD's February 2007 Position Paper and Resolution on Horizontal Regulatory Initiatives in EU-US Regulatory Cooperation. I will post more information as the meetings continue.

On Tuesday, we have an open conference on emerging privacy issues related to both RFID and so-called ubiqitious computing, "when technology recedes into the background of our lives" (a mediocre summary by me-- when everything has a chip, and computers do everything, even if you don't see them, what are the societal implications--privacy and what else?).

A number of consumer advocates are over in Geneva, Switzerland at the latest meeting of the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO continues deliberations on a PIRG-opposed treaty that would grant massive and unprecedented intellectual property rights to broadcasters, and could still extend those rights to Internet webcasters. More from CPTech's Jamie Love at his Huffington Post blog.

Over at his Huffington Post blog, my colleague Jamie Love of CPTech has posted a good analysis of some of the issues raised at the important international meeting at Harvard Law School on Open Document Formats (ODF) I attended yesterday, along with Amina Fazlullah, our new media reform attorney (my previous blog). The meeting was sponsored by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue. Excerpt from Jamie's post:

A handful of thoughtful government officials are trying to require software vendors, including Microsoft, to use this new open standard, in order to achieve a number of important public policy objectives, including:

* More competition among suppliers of software,
* Improved ability to manage archives of data,
* Enhanced ability to use and re-purpose data contained in documents.

The State of Massachusetts and the government of Belgium and Denmark have already put in place requirements that ODF be supported by software companies, and now other governments are beginning to consider similar initiatives. If they succeed, it could result in a revolution in the structure of the entire software market, and bring much needed competition and innovation to these important areas.

Just a thought: Now that Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank have been deservedly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below," will U.S. banks and credit unions wake up and do a better job of offering fairly priced loans and overdraft protection to American consumers being ripped off by both their own shoddy "bounce protection" products as well as by the payday lenders and other loan sharks out there? From the Nobel Committee: MORE:

Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. Grameen Bank has been a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.

Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.

I've previously discussed efforts by webcasters to push unprecedented language in a proposed broadcast/webcast treaty that would grant them a new type of intellectual property right over any content that passed through through their portals, even to content they'd never owned, didn't create or was already in the public domain. MORE:

Thanks to efforts by a PIRG-backed coalition of consumer and civil liberties groups allied with some major corporations, the US recently withdrew its puzzling and longstanding support for the sweepingly dangerous proposal. Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest reports "the US and developing countries such as Chile and India worked together to broker a deal to limit the scope of the proposed broadcast treaty to combating signal theft, instead of the more expansive rights that broadcasters had originally been seeking" (and webcasters had been hoping to get in on). The events occurred at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) General Assembly meeting in Geneva.

Over in Geneva, negotiations continue on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is a UN agency) proposal to extend a new form of property rights to broadcasters and even to webcasters. A number of public interest advocates are over there lobbying against the treaty and summarize daily discussions at a WIPO Casting Treaty blog. Yesterday, a diverse coalition including public interest and civil society groups along with companies we often otherwise oppose -- such as Verizon -- gave a workshop to treaty negotiators and the media. Last week, we co-signed a statement (html ) against the treaty, along with numerous public interest organizations and businesses and associations including Verizon, Dell, Cingular, HP and several industry trade groups. My previous blog on this important Access to Knowledge (a2k) issue. From today's Los Angeles Times story Proposed Treaty on TV Signals Spurs Criticism:

"Many believe that the broadcasters see this exclusive right as a way to protect an industry that is rapidly being eclipsed by technological development," said Matthew Schruers, senior counsel for litigation and legislative affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Assn., an industry trade group. "There is a fear that right could prevent the use of cool new devices because people can't license them or because the broadcasters don't want to license them."

U.S. PIRG (our comments) and the PIRG-backed Transatlantic Consumers Dialogue (TACD comments) have each filed requested comments to the European Chemicals Bureau in support of the proposed European chemical safety law known as REACH. Recently, the new U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, C. Boyden Gray, has been revving up industry and official U.S. opposition to the extremely pro-environmental, pro-public health proposal (my previous blog).

[Addendum: Here's a direct link to the audio.] Well, if if I have converted British Summer Time correctly, I expect to appear in Privacy In Peril, a special program on identity theft and data security of BBC Radio's Money Box, today Tuesday at 3:02pm (EDT) Eastern US time (2002 BST for friends in London and Portugal) and again this Sunday 3 September at 12:02 pm EDT (1702 BST). You should be able to listen to the stream anytime after the show airs today. Here's the web-version of the story, which quotes me and privacy champion Debra Bowen, California State Senator.

This week, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, well-known for its no-strings-attached individual "genius" grants to activists, academics, musicians, authors and others, announced that Knowledge Ecology International (formerly CPTech) was among the first winners of its new round of organizational genius grants. (Well, they're actually called MacArthur Awards for Creative and Effective Institutions.) It's a well-deserved award. MORE:

We've been fortunate over the years to work with the organization Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech) in campaigns designed to balance intellectual rights claims with the broader public interest. Among other goals, KEI/CPTech and the PIRGs and others seek to preserve access to knowledge and access to medicine. The group, which is in the process of changing its name to Knowledge Ecology International, is led by the indomitable Jamie Love.

CPTech has led many important and visionary fights, including its successful WTO battle against the powerful prescription drug lobby PhRMA and its sycophants in the U.S. State Department and European Commission, which made it easier to bring critical low-cost AIDS drugs and malarial and other necessary medicines to African and other less-developed nations. More recently, CPTech/KEI is leading the fight against a proposed broadcast treaty which invents then preposterously grants for 50 years a whole new set of property rights -- including rights to materials already in the public domain -- to webcasters (our previous blog on the proposed WIPO treaty).

From the announcement by MacArthur.

For more than a decade, KEI led the successful campaign to lower prices of medicines essential for treating AIDS and other diseases through "compulsory licenses." It brought about numerous changes in international trade policy, working with nongovernmental organizations and academic partners to design a new trade framework and new financing mechanisms for medical research and development.

More recently, KEI has called on the World Intellectual Property Organization to take a more balanced approach between promoting intellectual property rights and serving the public interest. It seeks to slow or stop work on treaties that could restrict severely access to knowledge.

As the Washington Post story on the award notes, CPTEch/KEI is also working with U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders on innovative proposed legislation, HR 417, that would change the way we reward inventors of new medicines to "drive down the price of drugs by changing how research and development are financed. The goal would be for development to be based on drugs' potential health benefits, not on their potential market value."

One of the most important consumer protection fights occurring both in Washington and internationally is the battle to ensure access to knowledge and culture. Powerful special interests are using a variety of tactics and strategies to try to privatize and control access to knowledge and culture. There are many efforts, but among the most brazen is the ongoing effort by some "webcasters" to invent, then grab, property rights that never before existed. Jamie Love of CPTech has a new blog entry explaining the Bush Administration's latest submission to a Geneva-based UN agency known as WIPO, which is considering a proposed broadcast treaty that powerful webcasters -- Fox, Yahoo and AT&T and others -- have been using as a wedge to demand an unprecedented grant of new rights and control over information streamed through their servers, even if it exists in the public domain, and even if they don't own it, never owned it, and didn't create it. MORE:

Along with its other perhaps more significant claims, the Bush negotiators have also proposed that what had been called webcasting would henceforth be known as netcasting. The CPTech WIPO treaty page is here. As background, here's a joint statement a number of activists sent US negotiators in March.

For more on the philosophy and importance of preserving knowledge and culture in a shared commons, and the growing corporate threats to privatize and commodify that shared knowledge and culture instead, I recommend a book on threats to all kinds of publicly-held assets, Silent Theft (2002), by David Bollier and, more specifically, an article by Professor James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement. Both Bollier and Boyle explain the threat to public knowledge as having an historical parallel in the English Enclosure movement and subsequent Parliamentary Enclosure Acts -- where the rights of the public to graze and hunt on common lands and forests were taken away and those lands then granted to powerful special interests, as this review of Silent Theft explains:

In a massive project of social engineering, Parliament passed the Enclosure Acts, which stripped the commoners of their property rights and delivered the lands to individual, usually wealthy landowners. (By 1895, about half of one percent of the population of England and Wales owned almost 99 percent of the land.) Thus was born the market on a national scale. Land became a commodity---real estate---and commoners became commodities too, in the form of workers in a "labor market." Something people once thought was theirs suddenly was someone else's.

And as Professor Boyle explains:

We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind," but in a very real sense that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights may be "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

The European Commission's antitrust cops are putting heat on the Mastercard Association over possible anti-competitive practices concerning interchange fees imposed on merchants in its credit and debit card payment networks according to stories in today's New York Times and Wall Street Journal. From the Times:

The commission says that interchange fees on cross-border transactions amount to restrictive business practices because they prevent the banks from competing to offer lower fees to retailers, and indirectly to consumers. "The system could work without these fees," [an official] said.

In the International Herald Tribune, Holly Hubbard Preston compares the skyrocketing costs of a U.S. college education with costs in other countries. While the article, which uses statistics from the Student PIRG Studentdebetalert.org campaign, notes cost increases around the globe, it also shows that other nations are seeking solutions before their problems get as bad as the problems faced by U.S. graduates:

Politicians are becoming concerned that if the specter of debt leads young people to view higher education as a luxury not worth pursuing, their nations' competitiveness will suffer.

Last week, my colleague Jim Murray, director of the European consumer organization BEUC, and I represented the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) at a meeting with senior U.S. and European Union trade officials during the US/European economic summit held in Vienna, Austria. Here's some background before I explain our concerns about chemical safety. MORE.

Also attending were two representatives of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue. TACD and TABD each regularly (and separately) provide our views to the governments and for the last several years this joint meeting has occurred during the summit. There are actually a few matters, such as providing greater transparency and public input in trade decision-making, where TABD and TACD agree. But on most issues, we diverge. At this meeting, Jim and I discussed several issues detailed in our TACD summit statement, primarily associated with our opposition to intrusive intellectual property rights regimes backed by the governments that treat consumers as pirates and diminish consumer enjoyment of properly-purchased digital music and videos.

We discussed one additional area where we disagree with TABD and also with the U.S. government, which is on the need for strong laws to protect the public from chemical risks. U.S. chemical safety laws are notoriously weak, and consumer and environmental groups, as well as labor unions, on both sides of the Atlantic vigorously support a proposal known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) that has been wending its way through the European Parliament. At the meeting, we strongly criticized the U.S. government's longtime influence-peddling in the European Parliament against REACH. PIRG (statement to USTR), BEUC (its Chemical Cocktail website) and TACD (policy statement) have supported strong chemical laws and criticized U.S. meddling on REACH in the past. In particular, in Vienna, we were critical of recent anti-REACH remarks to an international business group by C. Boyden Gray, the new U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.

Gray is a longtime Bush family insider who served in the first Bush White House but has lately been more known as a deregulatory activist in a number of industry lobby campaigns (Gray backgrounder from Center for Media and Democracy). The appointment of the activist Gray to what has long been seen as a ceremonial ambassadorship offered to very large campaign donors may signal a new era in US/EU trade relations, one where consumer and worker health and safety protections are at even greater risk of deregulation.

Here's U.S. PIRG's chemical safety and environmental health page and an excerpt from PIRG's REACH statement to USTR:

When implemented, REACH will have untold benefits for human health and the environment. The European Commission projected that REACH could prevent between 2,200 to 4,300 cases of occupational cancer each year, and prevent $61 billion in health care costs over a 30-year period of time. REACH also includes many benefits for the U.S. economy, human health, and the environment. Because chemicals in the environment know no boundaries, regulatory action taken on chemicals in Europe that have the ability to travel long distances will positively affect the U.S. For example, action taken in the EU on brominated flame retardants may help to decrease the levels found both here in the breast milk of mothers in the United States as well as in the bodies of polar bears in the Arctic.

I am participating this week in an important conference in Paris - New Relations Between Creative Communities and Consumers. It is one of a series of conferences on access to knowledge (a2k) and culture being hosted by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumers Dialogue. Intrusive new copyright and intellectual property regimes being considered by governments and international treaty organizations such as the WIPO (previous blog) concentrate control over intellectual property in the hands of fewer and fewer powerful corporations, treat consumers as pirates while restricting their activities and fail to compensate the musicians, artists and authors -- who are the ones that are supposed to reap the benefits of copyright, trademark and patent protectio -- adequately. This conference brings together those actual creators with consumers.

The lack of net neutrality is one threat to the Internet. So is the proposed WIPO webcast treaty.Here's a new letter from U.S. PIRG, Public Knowledge and other groups urging Congress to investigate the treaty, which would grant unprecedented property rights to webcasters such as Yahoo, including the right to public domain and other content that the webcasters did not create. MORE:

Two little-noticed agencies, the Commerce Department's U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, have spent the last several years over in Geneva at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is part of the UN) negotiating a treaty that would grant unprecedented intellectual property rights to webcast companies like Yahoo. But they've kept it low-profile despite numerous attempts by public interest groups to convince them to open up their process. Here's an excerpt from our new letter on what's at stake:

We are troubled not only by the substance of the treaty, but also by the fact that the U.S. delegation, represented by the Library of Congress Copyright Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), have failed to engage in any public discussion about the effect of the treaty on consumers, industry, copyright holders and U.S. law...
The harm to the millions of consumers represented by the undersigned organizations would be particularly great – this additional layer of rights could permit broadcasters to restrict access to content within the home and could limit lawful uses of content over the Internet. Thus, this treaty could reverse the explosion of diverse and increasingly sophisticated “user generated” content that has become part of the fabric of the Internet.

Consumers: Mobile Commerce is the possibility to make purchases of goods or services using your cell (mobile) phone or your web-enabled Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or pager or similar device. We would be very grateful if you could spare no more than 5 minutes to complete this survey exploring consumers' experiences with mobile commerce. The survey is being run by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue, a forum of European Union and US consumer organizations.

Jamie Love of CPTech is over in Geneva at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is a part of the UN you may have never heard of) attempting to stop a proposed treaty that would grant an unprecedented, unacceptable new form of property right to webcasters such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Murdoch (he owns Myspace) and others. Here's the lead from Jamie's blog entry:

Don't bother reading this unless the words "new intellectual property right" and "the Internet" seem important when put together, because it is a twisted and complicated story. Even the key players are struggling to figure out what is going on. But like a lot of twisted and complicated things, it is important.

Here's more from Jamie Love's blog entry

Web pages are full of documents, sound recordings and video that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, or simply passed around informally. Information on the Internet often is republished on many different web sites, each reaching its own communities. This is exploding at an astonishing rate as the costs of making and hosting works falls. Within a short time, anyone will be able to create a webcast from a mobile phone, and create records of meetings of all types, news events, performances, interviews, or any number of other events.

Increasingly, people are using these works to create newer works, in documentaries, news reports and commentary, or cultural or technical works that remix or mashup content. Grid Computing and other emerging technologies are creating astonishingly creative and important ways of collaborating.

Copyright alone presents huge problems for the distribution of and creation of these new Internet based works. But a new intellectual property right for webcasting will make things even more difficult, at least doubling the permissions one needs. At a minimum it will increase transaction costs. At worst, it will change the culture of sharing information on the Internet, with some exercising as many rent seeking rights as they can acquire.

Who is pushing for this new "webcasting" middleman right? It is not the vast majority of bloggers, web page owners and others who are creating and distributing content. It is a tiny handful of big corporate players, including most notably US companies like Yahoo, News Corp (owner of MySpace), Microsoft, Time-Warner/AOL, AT&T, and a handful of large European media companies, including it seems, the BBC.

Our colleague Jamie Love of CPTech, one of the world's leading experts and activists on intellectual property rights, has a nice blog piece, Terrorism, Pfizer Style, where he explains how the massive pharmaceutical company Pfizer has sued a Filipino regulator personally, and taken other actions, apparently with support from the U.S> government, to block extremely modest efforts to lower the costs of the profitable hypertension drug known in the U.S. as Norvasc. More.

In the Philippines, Pfizer charges from $.88 to $1.46 per day for Norvasc (more for the larger dose). In 2004, the average per capita income in the Philippines was $3.20 per day. Eighty percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day. Pfizer knows this. They have calculated that they can make greater profits selling Norvasc at a high price to a small number of the wealthiest Filipinos (less than 5 percent of the population can afford the drug), than a larger number of people with lower incomes.

Several attendees have posted detailed blogs on last week's Politics and Idealogy of Intellectual Property Conference in Brussels. More.

I participated (see immediate previous blog) in the event sponsored by the PIRG-backed TACD. Here's Ian Brown's post over at Blogzilla, where he comments on participant Bruce Lehman's revelation that the TRIPs (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual property) agreement he'd negotiated as a senior Clinton official was a "mistake" for the U.S. Meanwhile, Johanna Gibson, JD, PhD, who runs the Patenting Lives Project of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, University of London has posted her own summary where she says that the event

"demonstrated the ever increasing importance of civil society in international norm setting, and the undeniable importance of "consumers" (indeed, producers in their own right) as stakeholders in international intellectual property law debate."

I'm participating Monday and Tuesday at a conference on The Politics and Idealogy of Intellectual Property in Brussels, Belgium. The conference speakers and issues are worldwide in scope; it is sponsored by the PIRG-backed Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD): From the brochure:

In recent years, intellectual property policy issues have gained higher profiles in Europe and the United States, as debates over patenting of software and business methods, copyright term extensions, the public domain nature of the Human Genome Project, access to medicine, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, and other hot button issues have attracted a wide public audience...In particular, the meeting will examine how the struggles over the control and ownership of the new knowledge economy relates to our concepts of ideology, in party political positions platforms and political rhetoric.

On Wednesday 22 Feb the U.S. National Academies of Science are holding a public seminar and live webcast on attempts by webcasters (Yahoo et al) to use a proposed international treaty being negotiated at the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to gain greater power over information that currently exists in the public domain. It's a bad idea (our previous blog has details) and we've been opposing it. Our colleague Jamie Love of CPTech is one of the speakers and CPTech has action alerts and backgrounders here.