On Saturday 10 April, a group of concerned people got together in Wellington NZ (where the next round of ACTA began today) to hold a PublicACTA Conference to discuss the issues around the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Michael Geist and Kim Weatherall were keynote speakers, and the group broke down and analysed what we know [...]
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”. [...]
We’re talking about major changes that will hobble innovation and tie us to decaying business models that actually only benefit a very few corporations. How do artists, musicians and authors get any benefit out of this, when they’re already struggling with their respective industries to make a buck? It’s not piracy that’s taking your money, people – it’s the contracts you signed with your publishers.
So, what’s hauled me back to the keyboard? ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – you may remember that I’ve blogged on this before. Well, it’s just entered its next round, in Korea, that well-known home of freedom and civil liberties (and the first country in the world to pass a 3 strikes law and implement it). Some of the latest draft has been leaked (again) and the Internet is noticing.
BREAKING NEWS: Michael has reported a new Wikileaks document which purports to be an ACTA draft. It’s a 5.2MB download and appears to be photographs of a document dated 7 July 2008. It’s highly resistant to OCR but Wikileaks is hosting a page where transcriptions are being lodged I think it’s awfully interesting to note [...]
Someone emailed me and asked why I haven’t blogged anything about the ACTA “release of documents” last week. Basically, because it held no revelation, was not a release of information other than the spin agreed by the countries involved and because I’m currently working on something a lot closer to home, which I’ll post about [...]
Michael Geist, Canadian law professor and copyright activist, has published an ACTA timeline from a Canadian perspective. He kindly notes my post with regard to the pre-negotiation history, and goes into a fair bit of detail from October 2007 onward, and finishing with “To be continued…”. Michael organised the Facebook protest against C-61 – the [...]
There is a video going around on the Intarwebz. I am not going to link directly to it but you can find it in the blog I link to in this post. It’s a report from Russia Today about ACTA. It has a clip of Richard Stallman sounding off, and a few others, and intimates [...]
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 [...]
Astute readers of the net will have noticed that Korea has a proposal for a three strikes or, should we say “graduated response” piece of legislation. France is also going through the process of such legislation in spite of the fact that the European Parliament has declared it not suitable to Europe. In Ireland, the [...]