The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will finally be signed this Saturday, October 1, in Japan.
The agreement has been years in the making, but its final passage comes only after a vociferous campaign by civil society and digital rights groups demanding an end to the secrecy, a place at the negotiating table, and a scaled-back set of copyright and patent provisions. They did pretty well—as we previously noted, US negotiators on ACTA were pushing for some of the toughest language on DRM, Internet disconnections, and more, but had to climb down in the face of international resistance and public pressure.
The secrecy was so intense—despite a blizzard of statements about transparency—that leaked diplomatic cables showed other countries objecting. An Italian official complained that it was "impossible for member states to conduct necessary consultations with IPR stakeholders and legislatures under this level of confidentiality." In Sweden, an ACTA negotiator told the US embassy that "the secrecy issue has been very damaging to the negotiating climate in Sweden."
Gigi Sohn, head of Public Knowledge, is still venting her discontent with the process. "Although the final version of the Agreement was an improvement from earlier versions, we continue to believe that the process by which it was reached was extremely flawed," she said in a statement today. "ACTA should have been considered a treaty, and subject to public Senate debate and ratification or, in the alternative, debated in an open and transparent international forum such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Instead, public interest groups and the tech industry had to expend enormous resources to force the process open to permit public views to be presented and considered."
But existing institutions with worldwide memberships wouldn't have gone along with increased intellectual property protections, so the ACTA countries—including the US, EU states, Mexico, Australia, Japan, and Canada—went it alone.
The milder ACTA won't be treated like a treaty—which requires Senate ratification in the US—but like an "executive agreement" that cannot alter US law. The US is sending Ambassador Miriam Sapiro, the deputy US Trade Representative, to Tokyo this weekend to sign the final document, though it's not yet clear how many of the countries that negotiated ACTA will actually sign it right away. Signing will be held open until May 1, 2013.
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