ACTA in Korea: ’secret talks on transparency’
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- The current round of ACTA negotiations wrap up later today in Seoul, Korea. Having spent the first day focused on the now-leaked Internet provisions and the second day on the leaked criminal provisions, negotiators will spend this morning discussing whether they should make the draft treaty public.
Many countries continue to face pressure on the transparency issue, with KEI posting a public letter to U.S. President Barack Obama this week on the issue. Past indications are that there is a split – some countries favour making the draft available immediately, while others prefer ongoing secrecy until the treaty is completed. Compromise positions apparently include allowing individual countries to make available text for which they are responsible.
At this stage, even ACTA supporters should be supportive of greater transparency.
First, everything seems to leak anyways, so the substance of the treaty is already broadly known. Of course, there are specifics that have been shielded from public view, but there is enough out there to have generated an enormous backlash.
Second, ACTA is quickly becoming so broadly discredited that it will be nearly impossible to garner public support for the treaty. “The secret copyright treaty” is hardly a selling feature for a treaty that may be dead-on-arrival in the minds of citizens around the world.
Third, it is time for countries to make transparency a condition of participation.
I have my doubts about the treaty as a whole — the recent Internet leaks should make it a non-starter from a Canadian perspective — but even if the substance is put to the side, governments should not be supporting secretive copyright talks.
The talks will end at 12:30 (Seoul time) with the release of a joint statement describing who participated along with a generic statement indicating discussions focused on Internet enforcement, criminal provisions, and transparency matters.
It will conclude by indicating that the next round will be hosted by Mexico (most likely) in early 2010.
But on a day devoted to secret talks on transparency, governments should drop the diplomatic language and be prepared to open up or get out.
Michael Geist – Michael Geist’s Blog
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist @ uottawa dot ca]
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
November, 2009
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November 5th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
People have to start realizing that ACTA is not “just about copyright”.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it…
All these “trade groups” were invented as tools for Big Money to circumvent the processes of sovereign governments in order to install their own control. The fact that everything they do takes place behind closed doors and involves only the world’s “elite” and their invited corporate pawns should be enough reason for the rest of us to be thwarting them at every turn.
But, alas, it’s like the whole world fell into some permanent sleep years ago, judging by the progress these psychopaths have already made right under our noses.
I include members of our own Government in that list of psychopaths, as they continue to sell us out to the NWO, while denying even the existence of any of the activities they’ve been engaging with them. They downplayed NAFTA, and completely denied the very reality of the SPP negotiations, and have allowed American soldiers to station on our lands and fire tear gas at our citizens and trample on their relatives graves, for getting too close to the secretive Bilderberg meetings.
ACTA is just one of the many extortion rackets cooked up by the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, and the rest of the banking elite, as they systematically tear down all forms of world democracy that would stand in their way of their “one-world government” dream.
Canada needs to wake up!
We’re one of the few remaining countries that still prints its own money and isn’t “owned” by the World Bank. That will change, if we stay complacent to the actions of our government much longer. If they have their way, we will not even be a sovereign country of our own anymore, instead being a part of a larger “North American Union”, which would be run by appointed members of the corporate world (no more “elected government”), and put us in line to become part of a one-world government.
We need to stop giving creedance to these “trade conferences” and start calling them out for what they really are… high-end crime in action!
November 5th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
If the powers that be think that ISPs are going to be able to effectively patrol their own traffic for people downloading unauthorized copyrighted material, they must be incredibly naive. The week after the first ISPs start doing that, encrypted VPN services will spring up all over the place and developers will rush to create tools that anonymize everything online. It’s not like that’s not already happening, but ISP snooping will drive demand into that sector which will create great financial incentives for innovation.
If anything, the copyright control freaks are with the ‘terrorists’ because their tyrannical policies (3 strikes etc) will spur development of stronger and stronger privacy technologies, which make it much harder for the police to keep watch for future attacks.