More ACTA Talks This Week
September 21, 2010
| 11:12 AM
Negotiators on an international trade agreement aimed at curbing piracy and counterfeiting of copyrighted works and products will meet beginning Thursday for the 11th round of talks in Tokyo.
Among the items on the agenda for talks on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement include discussions of civil, criminal and border provisions, digital issues, international cooperation and enforcement practices. The negotiators also will discuss ACTA's definitions, general obligations, and initial provisions as well as "institutional arrangement and final provisions," according to the agenda released by the Japanese Embassy in Washington.
While the agenda also includes discussion of "transparency," the negotiations have been criticized as being too secretive. The negotiators have released few details of the draft agreement. In addition, critics worry that the agreement will include intellectual property protections in U.S. law without provisions aimed at protecting the rights of users.
The latest round is unlikely to quell such criticisms, particularly after the talks appear to have been move up by a few days, according to Sean Flynn, associate director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University's Washington College of Law.
"It is hard to conclude other than that the negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, with the Obama Administration in the lead, do not want meaningful civil society input into the negotiation of the agreement," Flynn wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
The Japanese government announced there would be a meeting with civil society groups on Friday. Flynn noted that negotiators have been holding such meetings at some of the recent rounds. He added, however, that they are "getting less and less substantive and this one appears designed to ensure that no [nongovernmental organizations] show up." The meeting was just announced this week, giving at least U.S.-based groups little time to fly to Japan, Flynn said.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not have an immediate comment. USTR, however, has said in the past that international trade agreements require confidentiality sometimes "to enable officials of participating governments to engage in frank exchanges of views, positions, and specific negotiating proposals, and thereby facilitate agreement on complex issues."
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