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 later in the week.
Canada’s report on ACTA consultation notes was more interesting, frankly, and that was only a rerun of the stuff we’ve seen before from MED.
Glyn Moody had a good take, highlighting the paradox for the governments involved:
On the one hand, the negotiators have to pretend that “a comprehensive set of proposals for the text of the agreement does not yet exist”, so that we can’t find out the details; on the other, they want to finish off negotiations as quickly as possible, so as to prevent too many leaks. Of course, they can’t really have it both ways, which is leading to this rather grotesque dance of the seven veils, whereby bits and pieces are revealed in an attempt to keep us quiet in the meantime.
Michael Geist dissected what came out of Canada in a five-part post that gave more respect to the material than I thought was due.
Unless we see the full draft text, there really is nothing to report. Apparently, the parties are still hoping to meet in the next 8 weeks in Morocco, but we don’t appear to have a firm date yet.
Ho hum.
2 Comments
Thanks for the link. As you probably saw, I’ve just written another post saying essentially the same as you: that the “new” drafts on Wikileaks contain nothing new, and reinforce the impression that they could release the current ACTA draft without revealing anything too shocking (unless the Internet section has something really awful.)
Too true. The interesting bit is that it can be shown to exist since May last year, despite all the denials. Still, we knew that. Did they really expect us to believe that they’d start a multi-government negotiation without even a strawman document?
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