The Canadian government has re-launched its consultation on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The last consultation was conducted in the spring. While the government did not release the results of that consultation, I recently reported on the findings based on documents obtained under the Access to Information Act.
The new consultation will be treated as ongoing, meaning that there is no fixed deadline for submissions. The government notes that responses to this consultation may be made available to the public. While it is good that the government is open to public input on ACTA, this new approach raises at least two concerns. First, it has provided no new information about ACTA, effectively asking Canadians to comment on a treaty that they know virtually nothing about (almost all public information comes by way of leaks). Second, the rolling consultation may simply allow the government to claim that it has continuously consulted the public, while knowing that the response will be ad-hoc and (by virtue of the lack of information) uninformed. What is needed is more public information about ACTA. Other countries have brought together all stakeholders for more open and transparent discussions about the treaty and the negotiations. Similar open discussions in Canada are long overdue.
grunt
time to remail all the old petations…
and inflate the numbers as best we can.
pat
If IP is Property, where is the Property Tax?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-weaver20feb20,0,1675278.story
Where is the tax on Intellectual Property?
Banning anti-circumvention research bears ill fruit…
India has experienced an ill effect of banning security research. Terrorists have figured out how to clone cell phone SIM cards. The good guys didn’t know this was possible, because they can’t do the research: “The experts said no one has actually done any research on SIM card cloning because the activity is illegal in the country.”
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/PDATOI/pdaarticleshow/3670337.cms
If the good guys can’t even participate, the bad guys will always win.
-From this month’s Cryptogram
ACTA should target China
If ACTA were really an anti-counterfeiting agreement, its main target would be China, the largest counterfeiter in the world ever.
But it is not, and we can expect even more crap to flow into Canada and USA, because customs can’t really put a barrier to it. One reason is that buying cheap crap is now part of North-American consumer culture.