![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
India vows to sabotage ACTA
Jun. 9th, 2010 10:51 amFed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.
Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.
In other words, existing international institutions, where countries like Brazil, China, and India have recently acquired some real power, will be bypassed to create the tough new restrictions in ACTA.
India raising hell, I think, is a good thing. India's objection is not over media anti-piracy and copyright, but over pharmaceuticals. There's some very nasty patent protections that extend even if country X doesn't recognize country Y's patents or have different term limits or such.
But what really ticks me off is the secret negotiating aspect of this treaty, and as the article points out, bypassing WTO and WIPO to institute it. It's like the USA trying to get everyone to sign on to DMCA, but not being very above-board about it. DMCA is now crawling out of the grave in Canada again, so we'll see what happens there. In Canada, currently, if you buy an iPod or Music CD-Rs, you pay an additional tax that supposedly helps reimburse artists for losses due to piracy, but that money never seems to trickle down from the studios for some strange reason.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/india-vows-to-sabotage-acta.ars
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/02/2157252/India-Attempts-To-Derail-ACTA?art_pos=12
Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.
In other words, existing international institutions, where countries like Brazil, China, and India have recently acquired some real power, will be bypassed to create the tough new restrictions in ACTA.
India raising hell, I think, is a good thing. India's objection is not over media anti-piracy and copyright, but over pharmaceuticals. There's some very nasty patent protections that extend even if country X doesn't recognize country Y's patents or have different term limits or such.
But what really ticks me off is the secret negotiating aspect of this treaty, and as the article points out, bypassing WTO and WIPO to institute it. It's like the USA trying to get everyone to sign on to DMCA, but not being very above-board about it. DMCA is now crawling out of the grave in Canada again, so we'll see what happens there. In Canada, currently, if you buy an iPod or Music CD-Rs, you pay an additional tax that supposedly helps reimburse artists for losses due to piracy, but that money never seems to trickle down from the studios for some strange reason.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/india-vows-to-sabotage-acta.ars
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/02/2157252/India-Attempts-To-Derail-ACTA?art_pos=12
