There have been a bunch of leaks from the ACTA process lately, and this week saw 2 of the biggest – the names of the countries who are opposing transparency and, even more surprisingly, a breakdown of the positions different negotiating teams are taking on aspects of the US proposal, known as the “Internet Chapter”. I think both documents are genuine, though I wouldn’t put it past the negotiators to put out misinformation as part of a bait-and-switch campaign, but I haven’t read through the documents yet in enough detail to comment on them, though others have:
One thing that stands out, as Nat notes, is that the reported New Zealand positions are much more realistic and reasonable than MED’s public utterances would have lead us to anticipate. That’s great, but we’re only one voice at a table we shouldn’t really be sitting around. And I say again, there is nothing in a confidentiality agreement that limits you exposing your own position to your own citizens. If you’ve got nothing to fear…
ACTA is coming!! That’s right, sportsfans! The circus called ACTA is coming to Wellington on 12-16 April this year. In the lead up to that, the Commerce Minister, Simon Power, is calling for submissions “to help set a higher benchmark for the enforcement of intellectual property rights”, so there’s obviously no prejudging going on there ¡ Make your submission by 31 March.
Also, this week, InternetNZ announced that they will be hosting a PublicACTA session on the 10th of April, as a counterpoint to the SecretACTA sessions the Government is hosting. I’ll be at that session and I encourage anyone with a Saturday to spare to be there two.
And lastly, this week, I gave a presentation on ACTA at Ignite!Wellington, focussing on the secrecy, as well as something we haven’t heard too much about – pharmaceuticals. It’s worth noting that at the USTR Special 301 meetings this week counterfeit drugs was very prominent in the committee’s questioning of NGOs.
Have a look at the Ignite! site, as there were some other good sessions (Mike Brown’s zen poem about cycling across America was my favourite) but I’ve embedded the video of my talk below as well, if you just want the ACTA bits. It’s a testing format – 5 minutes, 20 slides changing every 15 seconds – but I enjoyed it and learned heaps for the next one ;-) Very hard to draw down hours of material into 5 minutes. Might help to think of it as a series of tweets…
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