Friday sees Aussies fight for fair ACTA
The Internet Industry Association (IIA) and other stakeholders will this Friday have their chance to be briefed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Canberra.
The ACTA aims to establish international standards on how to enforce intellectual property rights, and has involved countries around the world including Australia. It has been met with some criticism, mainly around the talks being held in private.
Late April, however, the European Commission of Trade released a draft of the agreement following a declaration calling for the release of an official draft. The IIA asked its members to sign the declaration.
When the draft was released, IIA chief executive officer (CEO) Peter Coroneos said the IIA would now be in a better position "to garner a range of views from the internet industry in Australia and, where necessary, bring to the attention of negotiators areas that were previously identified via leak as being problematic".
The IIA will this Friday send IIA representative John Hilvert and Queensland law lecturer Kimberlee Weatherall, who is helping them decipher the ACTA, to the briefing held by DFAT in Canberra to discuss its concerns.
Hilvert intends to ask DFAT a broad range of questions, including whether DFAT has done "a line-by-line compatibility check of the draft proposals" with current law. He said that analysis done by Weatherall suggested that there were "quite a few conflicts" with current law.
Another issue that would be brought up, according to Hilvert, had to do with internet service providers (ISPs) and third-party responsibilities that are in the ACTA.
"At first glance it appears that ACTA will provide additional and uncertain new responsibilities over and above what ISPs have at the moment," Hilvert said. He also said the IIA was "interested to find out a little bit more information on the use of injunctions that rights holders might take against non-infringing third parties".
In other words, if a user was distributing pirated content using an ISP's network, ACTA suggests that an injunction be able to be taken out against the ISP.
He said it was one thing to get an injunction against an infringing third party, but that it was "very unusual to have an injunction against non-infringing third party".
"It's a little bit like, if there was a drive-away robbery and the robbers happened to take a cab: somehow you [could] take [out] an injunction against the cab driver because they happen to be associated with the infringer."
Hilvert said the IIA would also ask about the fair-use provisions, adding that ACTA didn't provide the same level of freedom to use content without incurring a penalty that the US currently enjoys.
"So we're getting in a situation where we're in what appears to be a much tougher, and unjustifiably tougher, frankly, view of what should be required in enforcement without any balance of user interest," Hilvert said.
Lastly, Hilvert said, the IIA wanted to make sure that future drafts of the agreement remained public.
In a similar vein, Labor Senator Kate Lundy just yesterday questioned some of the reasons behind the ACTA in a blog post. "As we have seen in pretty much every trade agreement that includes intellectual property, there is a bit of a ground war afoot as to how much goes too far, led by those in the strongest position to dictate the terms," she said.