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This was only to be expected; there is no reason why American film studios have to agree to anything but what they want when the game is being played on a government-to-government level. The US is pushing for more draconian restrictions on ISPs through the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was announced at the recent APEC summit. Negotiations are continuing among the nine nations that are involved - the US, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore - to bed down the treaty.
The aim of the TPPA insofar as the US is concerned is to make sure that its big multinationals improve their ability to gouge profits from their international operations. IP is a big part of the TPPA plan as is evident from a leak (PDF) of the draft back in February.
It containes scary proposals. Draconian measures are proposed to apply to ISPs. Laws will have to be put in place to require ISPs to co-operate with copyright owners in preventing unauthorised storage and transmission of copyrighted materials.
Legal liability for ISPs will extend beyond the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Internet users will, by law, have to be identified by an ISP if copyright owners have given 'effective notification of claimed infringement".
There is also a proposal to extend the copyright period to a minimum of 95 years from creation of a work to a maximum of 120 years. Parallel trade in any copyrighted goods is ruled out altogether in the draft.
With the US pushing hard, the Labor government, in turn, has been pushing ISPs to come up with ideas. But have no doubt about it, the US will have the final say.
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