How will you know if you've violated copyright when the rules are secret?

Critics of the Bush Administration often pointed to its overuse of "national security" arguments to conceal unrelated issues, and now the Obama administration is taking that to even sillier extremes, by refusing to disclose the terms of a proposed copyright agreement with Japan.

President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage."

No doubt the secrecy involves enforcement mechanisms and extradition details, but still, not only will it be impossible for people to obey laws they can't see, it's enormously of interest for citizens to be able to react to and shape laws which are being developed. The memo from the administration claimed that all but 10 of the 800+ pages of the document were classified. That's just baloney.

In other copyright news, TechDirt summarizes some analysis which suggests that the introduction of copyright protection had the effect of reducing classical music production throughout Europe. In New Zealand, they're still battling Section 92A, the guilt upon accusation law.

We're used to the idea that copyright is a net benefit for composers and other artistic creators, but at least the way copyright law is currently written, it could be backfiring, as the authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly are suggesting. As too often happens, laws are written for the benefit of big corporate political contributors rather than for the public benefit.