By Kim Weatherall

What a difference a fortnight can make!

Two weeks ago on this Review, I noted that we had no (official) access to the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA.  As of Thursday this week, though, we do (available here), following a decision by the negotiators last week to meet the demands of civil society and politicians for transparency.

There has been a reasonable amount of commentary already from the likes of Michael Geist, Margot Kaminski at Yale, and Sean Flynn at American University.  In fact, Michael Geist has a useful blogpost with links to commentary across the web.

This official text is perhaps most interesting in showing where the negotiators have got to since January.  My summary?  There are some improvements: there seems to have been some attempt to respond to industry and civil society concerns; and so some (definitely not all) of the nastiest stuff has been taken out and new flexibilities are proposed, if not yet agreed.

The language that had been interpreted as potentially imposing ‘three strikes’ legislation (or graduated response) – that is, requiring ISPs to engage in a process of graduated responses to file-sharing by customers in response to copyright owner complaints culminating in suspension or termination of internet service – that’s kind of gone.  It was in a footnote to the text that now starts on page 19 of the official draft text, and it used to refer (back in January) to ISPs having a policy for the termination of repeat infringers. Now the text just says (on page 21) that at least “one delegation proposes to include language in this footnote to provide greater certainty that their existing national law complies with this requirement”.  In other words, I think that the US, and probably Australia, and maybe another country want confirmation that their domestic requirement for a termination policy complies with the language of ACTA. But they won’t tell us what that text is right now – maybe its not been drafted yet.

There are some general provisions at the front now (at least proposed) referring to important concepts like the protection of privacy and confidential information, proportionality, and that the agreement does not require countries to redistribute scarce enforcement resources to prioritise IP over everything else (my paraphrase).

The statutory damages provision now includes a proposal to allow additional damages instead.  As I’ve explained at length elsewhere additional damages are better than statutory damages, largely because they allow courts to decide who is an appropriate person to be punished (rather than the rightsholders): they put in place more discretion.  That said, they can be pretty darn arbitrary. But better.

There’s a proposal to allow countries to choose whether to apply border measures to patent and design infringements rather than mandating their coverage.  As I’ve noted before, inclusion of patents is problematic because of the potential impact on legitimate businesses including generic pharmaceutical manufacturers.

On the other hand, some of the material I described as concerning in the post a fortnight ago, and in a more lengthy paper that’s available online, is still there.

There is still a proposal to allow rightsholders (and, by the way, rightsholders includes representative groups like the RIAA or MPAA) to get injunctions against intermediaries whose services are used by third parties to infringe – even where the intermediary is not itself liable – thus potentially turning the ISP into the enforcement arm of the rightsholders and courts.

There is still a provision that seems to be proposing the creation or ‘confirmation’ of secondary liability – something not found in international treaties anywhere else and something that is entirely about substantive law, not enforcement, and so inappropriate here.

The draft still proposes an elaborate ACTA superstructure which, for reasons Geist has explained, is pretty darn concerning.  Let’s face it: bodies like this need to justify their own existence and will create work for themselves.  Including working groups for new and even more exciting enforcement provisions into the future.

There’s a nasty possibility that Kaminski points out: they’re debating criminalizing “[i]nciting, aiding and abetting” infringement.  These provisions are both up for debate, and should not be included in the final draft if ISPs don’t want to become subject to criminal investigations.

And there’s still plenty of provisions where the possibility of applying the provisions to patent is still on the table, albeit with border measures those measures are optional.

And there’s more.  This post can only touch on the kinds of detail we are seeing in this proposal.  There is much yet to work through. At least we now have something to go on.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under ACTA, Copyright, counterfeit, piracy, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.