IP Watchdog: Will ACTA Cover Patents?
Intellectual property think tank Knowledge Ecology International has asked the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to clarify whether the pending Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will cover patents. "There is considerable confusion on this point," KEI Executive Director James Love wrote Wednesday on the micro-blogging site Twitter. "If the ACTA text was not declared a national security secret by the White House, we could read the text on injunctions and damages," he added.
Officials from the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico and other countries have resumed discussions so they can finalize the pact in 2010, according to Trade Representative Ron Kirk, whose team has been reviewing ACTA and other trade deals. He has vowed to move forward as transparently as possible. Watchdog groups have routinely called for more openness and public participation in negotiations that began under former President George W. Bush.
"This is big government and big business at its worst, creating rules without input or sensitivity to the concerns of consumers, overriding civil rights, undermining privacy, increasing prices to consumers," KEI said in a June statement. "The topics under review are not simple technical issues or directed at organized crime, they are big sweeping changes in our basic freedoms, and underhanded attempts to give lobbyists rules they can't get in a normal democratic setting."
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