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ACTA Negotiations, Day Three: Secret Talks on Transparency

The current round of ACTA negotiations wrap up later today in Seoul, Korea.  Having spent the first day focused on the now-leaked Internet provisions and the second day on the leaked criminal provisions, negotiators will spend this morning discussing whether they should make the draft treaty public.  Many countries continue to face pressure on the transparency issue, with KEI posting a public letter to U.S. President Barack Obama this week on the issue. Past indications are that there is a split – some countries favour making the draft available immediately, while others prefer ongoing secrecy until the treaty is completed.  Compromise positions apparently include allowing individual countries to make available text for which they are responsible.

At this stage, even ACTA supporters should be supportive of greater transparency.  First, everything seems to leak anyways, so the substance of the treaty is already broadly known.  Of course, there are specifics that have been shielded from public view, but there is enough out there to have generated an enormous backlash.  Second, ACTA is quickly becoming so broadly discredited that it will be nearly impossible to garner public support for the treaty. "The secret copyright treaty" is hardly a selling feature for a treaty that may be dead-on-arrival in the minds of citizens around the world.  Third, it is time for countries to make transparency a condition of participation. I have my doubts about the treaty as a whole – the recent Internet leaks should make it a non-starter from a Canadian perspective – but even if the substance is put to the side, governments should not be supporting secretive copyright talks. 

The talks will end at 12:30 (Seoul time) with the release of a joint statement describing who participated along with a generic statement indicating discussions focused on Internet enforcement, criminal provisions, and transparency matters.  It will conclude by indicating that the next round will be hosted by Mexico (most likely) in early 2010.  But on a day devoted to secret talks on transparency, governments should drop the diplomatic language and be prepared to open up or get out.

9 Comments

  1. Devil's Advocate says:

    “Trade Groups”
    People have to start realizing that ACTA is not “just about copyright”.

    I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it…
    All these “trade groups” were invented as tools for Big Money to circumvent the processes of sovereign governments in order to install their own control. The fact that everything they do takes place behind closed doors and involves only the world’s “elite” and their invited corporate pawns should be enough reason for the rest of us to be thwarting them at every turn.

    But, alas, it’s like the whole world fell into some permanent sleep year ago, judging by the progress these psychopaths have already made right under our noses.

    I include members of our own Government in that list of psychopaths, as they continue to sell us out to the NWO, while denying even the existence of any of the activities they’ve been engaging with them. They downplayed NAFTA, and completely denied the very reality of the SPP negotiations, and have allowed American soldiers to station on our lands and fire tear gas at our citizens and trample on their relatives graves, for getting too close to the secretive Bilderberg meetings.

    ACTA is just one of the many extortion rackets cooked up by the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, and the rest of the banking elite, as they systematically tear down all forms of world democracy that would stand in their way of their “one-world government” dream.

    Canada needs to wake up!
    We’re one of the few remaining countries that still prints its own money and isn’t “owned” by the World Bank. That will change, if we stay complacent to the actions of our government much longer. If they have their way, we will not even be a sovereign country of our own anymore, instead being a part of a larger “North American Union”, which would be run by appointed members of the corporate world (no more “elected government”), and put us in line to become part of a one-world government.

    We need to stop giving creedance to these “trade conferences” and start calling them out for what they really are… high-end crime in action!

  2. New world Order
    The infasmous New World order, 1 government, 1 currency
    and 98 per cent of us slaves to the 2 percent that will own us. Surprised??

  3. James MacFarlane says:

    web developer
    What would stop a majority government in Canada from ratifying ACTA without public consultation? If the CRTC’s recent behaviour is any indication of how online rights will be managed, this scares me.

  4. @Devil’s Advocate
    Canadians will never wake up and the reason is simple.

    If Harper or Ignatieff sense Canadian begining to wake up and start unifying aggainst them, they will aggain try to turn Quebec and the rest of Canada aggainst each other by using their year old tradition of Quebec bashing…

    Furthermore unlike the rest of Canada, there will be no mention what so ever about ACTA in Quebec. Only people like myself will know… and see slowly but surely the rights slavers(i’ll call them like that from now on) start using techniques to controle what you can have on your computer, remotely deleting annything that is aggainst them or using copyright infringement claims aggainst bloggers like Michael Geist to try to shut them up.

    Remeber Canada, unlike the rest of the world, has a wierd policial echosystem where right or left have little sence but instead the “evil” is percived by the native language of the person who speaks(aka english for Quebecois, french for english canadians).

  5. In the Darkness binds them…
    Obviously the treaty is not good for our society. It is unpopular. Those pushing it know it’s wrong. There is no other reason for all the secrecy.

    Lets pray our “leaders” have enough intelligence and fortitude to walk out. In fact a prerequisite for Canada to even enter these talks should have been transparency.

    Canada compromises too easily. Canada needs to stand up for what is right.

  6. pat donovan says:

    grunt
    and the EU leads the way with rights that actually have due process included.

    is this a plot to make smugglers even richer or what?
    packrat

  7. I love this idea.
    I really hope the conservatives adopt this policy.
    I can’t wait to sit outside of every conservative govt office and every Conservative MP’s office in my city, hack their wireless password (I think that is still legal to do, not sure, don’t really care) and do naughty things online using their internet connection.
    I haven’t met a security format that isn’t hackable yet. It will be fun to get every govt office within reach and get it shut from the internet.
    I could have so much fun with this.
    So, I can make lots of money selling wireless passwords to customers bad and good alike.

    Using an IP as an identifier, how incredibly archaic and stupid.

  8. did this get on any TV/news paper (except the star) ?????

  9. Unfortunate Times
    I’m ashamed to be a citizen of the nation which seems to be pushing hardest for this untenable treaty. But what can a citizen do in a two-party system where each candidate is controlled by their own set of corrupting multinational corporations?

    My greatest hope is that if nations ratify this treaty into law, the extreme one-sidedness will increase public awareness of the unfortunate state of international copyright law.