ACTA Draft Release Was Apparently A One Time Deal: Now We're Back To Secrecy

Copyright

from the transparency-shmancparency dept

After about a year or so of very public questions over the incredible level of secrecy of ACTA (including the patently ridiculous claim that details couldn’t be revealed for national security reasons), including a complete smackdown by the EU Parliament concerning the whole ACTA process, the negotiators finally (and very reluctantly) released the latest draft in April. Of course, by then, the full document had already leaked. Still, the officially released document left out some of the key parts that were in the leaked draft. Funny how that works.

But, of course, the negotiators pushing for ACTA pretended that the only concerns people had with ACTA were over the transparency issue, and now that a draft has been released, apparently they think that there should be no more complaints about ACTA. Uh huh. Except, of course, those who actually understand these issues, have pointed out some serious problems in the way ACTA is written, in that it locks in certain parts of copyright law that are very much in flux, and seems to export only the limits of copyright law, with none of the very important exceptions.

And, now it’s coming out that this new “transparency” may have been a one-time deal. The head negotiator from the EU, Luc Devigne (the guy who planned to ignore the rebuke from the EU Parliament), has apparently told people that the April release is all that they planned on releasing. So, after the next round of negotiations happens (next month), the latest document will not be released again.

However, the rest of Devigne’s comments reinforce some of the earlier reports from the field that we’ve heard, suggesting that large parts of the negotiation are still in dispute:

• There is still no agreement on the ISP safe harbour provisions.
• Major disagreements in the criminal chapter include the definition of “commercial scale” (the U.S. wants it defined, the EU wants it left to national judges) and the inclusion of an anti-camcording provision.
• Disagreements on the civil enforcement chapter includes damages and scope.

Of course, those are some very key points that will determine just how bad ACTA may be. The fact that the negotiators won’t be releasing updated drafts when these points are still very much in flux is quite troubling.

Filed Under: acta, luc devigne, negotiations, transparency