According to the Web site GamePolitics.com, representatives from the world’s industrial nations including the United States, Japan, Canada and the European Union, are secretly negotiating a treaty that may affect intellectual property and copyright protection.
Known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty is obviously not secret in name or existence, but in content. The agreement first reached media awareness in June 2008. Ars Technica, a technology news Web site, reported a possibility, based on the inside knowledge of Google copyright attorney William Patry, of Internet Service Provider (ISP) filtering.
Critics lambasted the secret nature of the ACTA. Patry said, “the attitude of USTR [United States Trade Representative] toward copyright is a blinkered, one-sided view that copyright is good and therefore as much of it as possible is even better.”
Through June and July 2008, the Essential Action organization produced and submitted a letter calling on ACTA negotiators to disclose the treaty’s intentions. More than 100 public interest groups from around the world signed the letter.
“The lack of transparency in negotiations of an agreement that will affect the fundamental rights of citizens of the world is fundamentally undemocratic,” the letter said. “It is made worse by the public perception that lobbyists from the music, film, software, video games, luxury goods and pharmaceutical industries have had ready access to the ACTA text and pre-text discussion documents through long-standing communication channels.”
In September 2008, after receiving no response from the USTR, two digital rights groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge, filed suit in federal court. Appealing to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a basis for the suit, the groups attempted to obtain comprehensive materials regarding the ACTA.
The Bush administration responded by holding a public event to reduce fears circulating around the ACTA, CNET reported. Stanford McCoy, assistant U.S. trade representative for intellectual property and innovation, told the audience of public interest groups that a draft of the agreement could not be released publicly because none existed at the time.
According to Ars Technica, the Bush administration aimed to wrap up ACTA discussion by the end of 2008, but Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) recently noted that the negotiation of the text is still in progress.
On Jan. 16, the Bush administration used its final days to tighten the veil of secrecy surrounding the ACTA. A public notice to Gwen Hinze of the EEF said that all but 10 of the 806 pages related to the treaty are “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”
KEI Director James Love filed another FOIA request on Jan. 31, upon the claim that the documents “are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public.” CNET reported on March 12 that the USTR responded to Love with a denial letter.
Obama’s continuation of his predecessor’s secrecy came somewhat as a surprise. In one of his first presidential acts, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure.”
Love spoke out originally against the ACTA in a June 2008 Huffington Post article, saying that the name was “deliberately chosen to intimidate and discourage politicians from expressing opposition to provisions that undermine civil rights and privacy.”
On March 13, Love continued his efforts by revealing the names of individuals with access to the classified documents. All of them, Love noted, are members of the 27 USTR advisory boards.
GamePolitics highlighted a member of particular interest: Stevan Mitchell, vice president of IP Policy
