Next Week: The Super Secret ACTA Negotiations
A lot is at stake for the tech sector at next week's Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations, hosted by the USTR in Washington.
The purpose of the ACTA negotiations, according to USTR, is to negotiate a new, state-or-the-art agreement to combat counterfeiting and piracy. The draft of the agreement, made public on April of this year, includes a section on the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the digital environment.
The meetings, which will be held all day August 16-20th, are closed press. It's unknown how many parties or which countries will be represented. The agenda, made public Thursday, does not include any information about speakers, attendees, or the topics up for discussion.
Australia, Canada, the European Union and its 27 member states, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and Switzerland are the countries named on the USTR website as trading partners that have worked on this agreement.
Under the proposal, "our companies would face legal liability in other countries for things that are perfectly legal in the U.S.," said Heather Greenfield, director of media relations at the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), her group opposes the agreement.
CCIA, a nonprofit whose members include Google and Facebook, advocates for open markets, systems and competition.
The secrecy about the negotiations is to "tamp down on public participation because it slows down the process," says Sean Flynn, an expert on information justice and intellectual property.
But the lack of transparency is a bad idea, "what they are negotiating here is a major and substantive intellectual property agreement," Flynn said. "To have that without getting input from the stakeholders is really devastating to the legitimacy of the agreement."
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