Martin Crutsinger writes that the US today started a world wide effort to expand enforcement of copyright link here. "U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said the administration planned to join with other countries to negotiate an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that would toughen efforts to confront copyright piracy." The move is initially directed at Canada, the 27-nation European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand and Switzerland. Schwab is quoted, "Today launches our joint efforts to confront counterfeiters and pirates across the global marketplace."

Her statement raises a lot of questions. Where do most of the violations occur? I suspect in poor developing countries which are not immediately the target here. But if we rope in the developed countries, copyright enforcement is likely to be part of more free trade agreements, extending the power of the new effort.

Schwab said the new agreement, which the administration hopes to negotiate quickly, would set a higher benchmark for enforcement that countries will be able to join on a voluntary basis voluntary if they want access to US markets. If the wording has to be negotiated among that large a group of countries, one wonders how quickly it can be done.

Schwab is also quoted, "Global counterfeiting and piracy steal billions of dollars from workers, artists and entrepreneurs each year and jeopardize the health and safety of citizens across the world." One may ask who benefits from copyright other than the owner of the copyright, typically a big company. Think Disney and Mickey Mouse, created by the long dead Walt.

So here we go with another effort to expand the reach of our state created monopolies.

Slashdot draws our attention to an an article by security researcher Peter Gutmann about DRM in Windows Vista. The gist of the article: Microsoft has chosen to degrade in important and significant ways the performance and capability of their operating system to protect "premium content." He is of the view that it probably won't work as far as protecting premium content, but will significantly raise the cost and lower the performance of such things as video cards - as well as making them difficult to reverse engineer for open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. It may well be that the latter is the intention of Microsoft - certainly the evidence is that Apple's music DRM doesn't do much for protecting content - but protects Apple from competition in the music business.

That said - the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content? Predictions are dangerous, but I will venture one: Microsoft's decision to build heavy DRM into the core of Vista will go down as one of the colossal business blunders of all time.