ACTA stands for “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” and after a year of negotiations (following a year of “pre-negotiations”), that’s all we really know for certain. Which is just a bit insane for countries that are supposed to be representative democracies.
Trade agreements are often negotiated under cover of secrecy, so that industry lobbyists can’t focus on details that affect their constituents and derail the process. But, with ACTA, the industry lobbyists appear to be in on the game, privy to the details and offering advice to the negotiating teams. It’s only we poor, tax-paying, voting citizens that aren’t allowed to know anything.
The media isn’t helping. I don’t recall much media comment at all in New Zealand on ACTA, over the last year. A Google search outside official government sites says there are 5180 responses for ACTA, but the first 20 shows blogs (Br3nda Wallace, Colin Jackson, Geekzone and me), InternetNZ and the Distilled Spirits Association (both of whom put in submissions during last year’s “consultation” spurred by the Wikileaks release). The rest of the results are for other uses of the word “acta” (which is Latin for “beach” apparently, but also “register of events”), often for scientific journals. Searching on “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” is a little better, but largely the same type of suspects. The mainstream media is conspicuous by it’s absence.
Computerworld has 13 articles, including the latest news that Obama’s administration appears no more transparent than Bush’s was. Stuff has 2, plus 1 more under “ACTA” from the Sydney Morning Herald. The NZ Herald has none. Zero. Not even a Reuters feed.
I want to take a moment to single out 2 reporters, Juha Saarinen and Stephen Bell, who have both educated themselves about this issue and both written about it. But they are generally regarded as tech reporters. Where are the mainstream reporters, the business analysts and economists? When will the NZ media wake up to the fact that this is not a tech issue? The level of omission looks deliberate.
It’s not much better overseas. Michael Geist’s legal column is serialized across a number of Canadian papers, so there’s some coverage there, but most of the message is carried on the blogs and lists, on the tech sites and the magazines like Computerworld (Glyn Moody in the UK has been active) and CNET. And it’s from CNET and Declan McCullagh that the current big story about ACTA comes (although, to be fair, it’s on blogs everywhere, and James Love has his post on the Huffington Post here) : Obama’s administration has invoked Executive Order 12958 to classify the ACTA documents as “classified in the interest of national security”.
What in [insert_deity]‘s name is in there??? How can a document about “harmonizing intellectual property enforcement” be a state secret that could damage national security??
Although, it’s not a secret to everyone. Love has a list of all the people who are allowed to see it. The Fertilizer Institute? Pfizer? Rubber Manufacturers Association??
If the governments negotiating this thing are trying to make people scared and rebellious, they’re doing a heckuva job. At times, I’ve thought that that’s exactly what they’re doing, so that they can bleed out all the “hysteria” (interesting how that term popped up in the s92A contretemps as well) and then say, “see? It’s not nearly as bad as you thought it was”, but I decided that none of the people I know are involved are actually that bright. I could be wrong on that, though. I’m starting to think it really is as bad as we think.
Love also has a list of other sites reporting the story, but there’s no MSM there, either.
[sigh]
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”
I had hoped for better from Obama’s administration, at least in terms of their vaunted transparency policy, but it looks like ACTA is one thing that won’t go on the RSS feeds. Looks like Townsend had it right, at least in the verse. It’s we who need to learn the chorus.
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