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The Truth About ACTA: My PublicACTA Keynote Address

As I posted over the weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in the PublicACTA conference in Wellington, New Zealand.  The Wellington Declaration is a must-read, as is the extensive media coverage that ACTA has received over the past 48 hours in New Zealand (NZ PC World, National Business Review, IT News, ComputerWorld NZ, NZ Herald).  The last few days have provided a model for how those concerned with ACTA should become engaged with future rounds of talks.

For those looking for up-to-date information on ACTA, my column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) previews the New Zealand talks, noting the pressure points on transparency and substance of the treaty.

Even better, all the videos from the PublicACTA conference can accessed online.  I have embedded my talk below. It provides a primer on the background of ACTA, reasons for concern, and a brief comment on what can be done.  An MP3 version of the same talk can be downloaded here.

5 Comments

  1. US – Feds raise questions about big media’s piracy claims by Greg Sandoval, cnet
    http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20002304-261.html

    After spending a year studying how piracy and illegal counterfeiting affects the United States, the Government Accountability Office says it still doesn’t know for sure.

    Congress tasked the GAO in April 2009 with reviewing the efforts to quantify the size and scope of piracy, including the impacts of Web piracy to the film and music industries. In a 32-page report issued Monday, the GAO said most of the published information, anecdotal evidence, and records show that piracy is a drag on the U.S. economy, tax revenue, and in some cases potentially threatens national security and public health. But the problem is, according to the GAO, the data used to quantify piracy isn’t reliable.

    —–

    US GAO Report: Intellectual Property: Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods — http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423

  2. Optimistic says:

    The (D’)Evolution Summit–Encouraging for Civil Society–Transparency and public particiption is vital
    http://d-evolution.fcforum.net/en/cronica/

    From the Web site:

    The (D’)Evolution Summit was a civil society meeting to open the minds of the European Community Ministers of Culture, who had gathered in Barcelona for an Informal Meeting in the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the European Union.

    To help us understand what they had come to Barcelona for, D’Evolution Summit had a day-by-day broadcast with commentary in (almost) real time of what the ministers and industries have said.

    So for them, things didn’t go as planned.

    We were able to verify, live, that when they are watched over, our rulers are not able to favour private interests with impunity, or to implement simplistic control policies based on obsolete formulas.

    What we saw:

    1 – The speeches supporting the interests of lobbies start to get a bit uncomfortable. What they usually do behind closed doors (and will continue to do). turns against them when it is discussed in public and has to contend with arguments.

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