A small Caribbean island nation of fewer than 90,000 people could become the first legal haven for pirated content on the Internet.
The World Trade Organization confirmed on Monday an earlier decision granting Antigua and Barbuda (which in English translates to "Antique and Bearded") the right to suspend U.S. copyrights, paving the way for a government-run pirate website full of U.S. copyrighted content like movies, TV shows, music and software.
The latest decision technically allows Antigua to launch an online website where it can sell access to U.S. copyrighted material without having to compensate whoever holds the legal rights to those materials. Think of a legally-approved Pirate Bay that requires a membership fee, for example.
This is just the latest chapter in a dispute that's been going on for more than a decade ? and it all started because of online gambling.
Antigua once had a strong online betting industry, which at its height employed 4,000 people, or around 5% of the nation's total population and was worth over $3.4 billion, according to the Antiguan government. In 2003 Antigua began arguing that American laws that barred placing bets across state lines by electronic means were a violation of global trade rules.
To seek justice, the country's government appealed to the WTO in 2003 and in 2005, the international body ruled that the U.S. government's refusal to allow Antiguan gambling sites to compete with its domestic ones amounted to a violation of free-trade.
In cases like these, the WTO normally gives nations the right to raise tariffs to compensate for their losses, but in Antigua's case, the WTO considered the nation too small for this solution to be effective. So instead of that, and after the U.S. kept refusing to change its gambling regulations, in 2007 the WTO gave Antigua the right to suspend U.S. copyrights up to $21 million annually in order to make up for its economic losses. This decision was confirmed on Monday.
In the meantime, Antigua's gambling industry has collapsed. It now employs only 500 people.
"The economy of Antigua and Barbuda has been devastated," said Antigua?s Finance Minister Harold Lovell in a statement. "These aggressive efforts to shut down the remote gaming industry in Antigua have resulted in the loss of thousands of good paying jobs and seizure by the Americans of billions of dollars belonging to gaming operators and their customers in financial institutions across the world."
According to Torrent Freak, there is no launch date yet, but the government has been working on the site for months. This doesn't mean that such a site will ever see the light of day, though. With the WTO decision in its pocket, Antigua hopes to force the U.S. government to a negotiated solution that would solve this issue.
"We are definitely working on it and are hopeful that the US will choose to negotiate fairly and honestly in the very near future so that we do not ultimately have to implement the remedy," Antigua's legal representative Mark Mendel told Wired UK. "We are not expecting this remedy to be anything other than a means to an end."
The American response, so far, has been negative. "The United States has urged Antigua to consider solutions that would benefit its broader economy," Nkenge Harmon, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative's office, told Reuters. According to her, such a plan by Antigua would "authorize the theft of intellectual property."
In other words, no deal for now.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, lam_chihang.
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/01/29/antigua-legal-pirate-haven/
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