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ACTA Guide, Part Two: The Documents (Official and Leaked)

Negotiations in the 7th round of the ACTA talks open this morning in Mexico with civil enforcement issues on the agenda.  Yesterday I posted on the developments to-date, including a chronology of talks, issues, and leaks that have led to this week's round of discussions.  Part Two of the ACTA Guide provides links to the underlying documentation.  Governments have been very tight lipped about the talks.  Initially, only a brief summary following the conclusion of each round of the talks was provided.  More recently, the agenda of each meeting is disclosed and a summary document (largely confirming Internet leaks) has been provided.  Links to each of these documents is posted below.

Of far greater importance are the leaked documents.  These have confirmed how the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is designed to extend far beyond counterfeiting and how it would reshape domestic law in many countries, including Canada.  Links to all the leaks are posted below.  Note that many are dated and therefore reflect initial thinking but may have changed over the course of recent discussions.

11 Comments

  1. Oh Brother! says:

    Quickly reviewing these documents … Let’s just say by comparison, Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Osama and their friends all appear to be the GOOD guys!

    Total loss of freedom to all. Makes you wonder what everyone fought for in the wars and sacrificed FOR THIS??

    Welcome to the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition.

  2. @Oh Brother! – Godwin invoked.

  3. Dr. Strangelove says:

    Head of Fuzzy Thinking, University of Ottawa
    Keep up the awesome work, Michael. I often use your blog as a teaching resource.

    This whole mess is a excellent example of how power is being evacuated from the nation-state and moved to unaccountable trans-national organizations.

    Nonetheless, it remains to be seen if law can actually change mass behaviour within the Internet. Thus far it has proven to be a very weak force (as I argued in The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-capitalist Movement, University of Toronto Press, 2005).

    Dr. Strangelove

  4. @ Jonothan – Quirk’s Exception.

    Scary stuff coming out of these ACTA talks. The good Dr. above me there raises interesting points, the first of which scares me even more than these documents.

  5. …..
    appalling to see, all this stemmed from a few interest groups, mainly recording and movie groups in united states of america. if you let too much room for corporations to wiggle, they would eventually try to impose their interests on citizens, without having any regard for democracy. and lo.

  6. We have to stop this legislation.

  7. @Johnathon – Not so fast
    The knee-jerk invocation of Goodwin’s Law in this case is trite and misplaced. There can be valid reasons to bring the name into a discussion and there is relevance here.

    Hitler was a very big friend of corporate power. When profit is the sole motive, some corporations see no ethical boundaries whatsoever. And many corporations, both domestic and international (some big names that you would recognize even today), helped finance him and many profited greatly from his misdeeds. Members of certain right-wing American political pseudo-dynasties were also supposedly among his fans.

    We must remember history, no matter how painful, so that we can avoid repeating past mistakes.

  8. Not sure what I’d expect, but…
    I was born in 1992. I haven’t seen anything ever improve, for the (very short length) of my political awareness. It almost seems normal for corporations to own the government, for our politicians to have no ideology beyond bowing to the almighty dollar… I don’t see a hope in hell of preventing this. Add this to the police drones in the UK, ETC ETC ETC, what the hell are we going to do? So this is the outcome of our technology… I feel like maybe the absolute best I can do for myself and maybe some others would be to get off the grid, grow my own food, etc. Absolute best I could do. China’s been the way it is well over half a century- most of that was without the kind of tech we have nowadays. How long do you think a police state could persist now? Generations, I think. This is so sad… It’s at times like this that I wish for a solar flare.

  9. Circumstance says:

    @ Mycelia
    While it’s sad to see these things happening, it’s probably what needs to happen before people are willing to make change. I don’t know how to solve this, but in the words of Howard Beale; “Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

  10. Madder than hell
    I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!

    The solution to “piracy” (read -copyright- infringement — quoting Stallman “piracy is attacking ships”) is -not- restrictions or surveillance. The -only- solution to this is to reshape the model for that part of the economy.