trade-agreement
Your life will some day end; ACTA will live on
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn’t just another secret treaty—it’s a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement. Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week , including a chapter on “Institutional Arrangements” that has not leaked before.
Continue reading »New ACTA leak shows major resistance to US-style DRM rules
The leaks keep coming for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). A new leak from Europe has revealed the inner workings of the negotiating process through a 40+ page document showing each country’s positions on key provisions of the treaty. While most of the negotiating is quite technical, what stands out most sharply is the international resistance to the US-drafted proposals on DRM “anticircumvention” rules.
Continue reading »Adding up the explanations for ACTA’s "shameful secret"
Why is an intellectual property treaty being negotiated in the name of the US public kept quiet as a matter of national security and treated as “some shameful secret”? Solid information on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been hard to come by, but Google on Monday hosted a panel discussion on ACTA at its DC offices . Much of the discussion focused on transparency, and why there’s so little of it on ACTA, even from an administration that has made transparency one of its key goals.
Continue reading »More protests over UK 3 strikes plan
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson’s (right) efforts on behalf of Hollywood and Big Music continue to come unglued to the extent a prestigious UK firm is now wondering if they’ll ever become law. The Big 4 record labels and Hollywood are simultaneously hammering their Three Strikes plan , “trying to have it adopted as law in countries such as Britain and France,” p2pnet said on Sunday, going on: “Implemented, it would have administrations acting as industry copyright agents, and local ISPs targetting their own customers on behalf of the cartels.” European legislators have just approved new rules which say users can be cut off only after a “ prior, fair and impartial procedure” which gives them ‘the opportunity to state their case and respects the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy’ has been completed. ‘ … wave of protest …’ ACTA is short for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Three Strikes plan is an integral part of it.
Continue reading »Time to pay for the net: Rupert Murdoch
ACTA — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — is of deep interest to anyone who’s the least concerned about the net. Last week, “the United States met behind closed doors with dozens of other countries in Seoul, South Korea to consider a global agreement on the enforcement of intellectual property rights,” said KEI and Public Knowledge , going on: “This agreement, though named the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), implicates changes to international intellectual property norms far broader than its name suggests.” ACTA has also been called the Hollywood Dream . But movie moguls, not to mention Big Music, aren’t the only ones watching its progress.
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