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EU will push to make draft ACTA public
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 24 March 2010
The European Union has called on the other countries involved in negotiating the previously reported and slightly secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to agree to make public a draft of the treaty document, to counter critics who say the intellectual property agreement will force three-strikes on any signatory countries.
As previously reported, there has been much speculation that the slightly secretive ACTA will include a clause forcing signatories to introduce a three-strikes system for combating file-sharing, like that being introduced in the UK by the Digital Economy Bill and already on the statute book in France. If this were so, because the EU is negotiating the Agreement on behalf of all its members, it would force all European countries to introduce a version of three-strikes.
But a leak of the agreement last month showed that three-strikes was not mentioned, and then at the start of this month an EU Commissioner said he would block any future efforts to include three-strikes in the treaty. Though speculation that the ACTA will result in three-strikes by the back door continue, and various European ISPs – who oppose any three-strike measures – are still raising concerns that such anti-file-sharing measures will appear in the treaty.
To that end, EU trade official Luc Pierre Devigne has told a public meeting that he is trying to get other countries involved in ACTA talks, including the US, Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Japan, to agree to make a draft of the agreement public, probably at the next meeting of the consortium of countries in New Zealand in April.
Devinge: “We want to have the negotiating document released so that rumours can be dispelled. [Putting] three-strikes [in the ACTA] is no one’s idea; no one has ever proposed that”.
