The ACTA treaty negotiation process is still going strong. The participants apparently feel pressured to finalise the agreement before the end of the year and have agreed to an extra negotiating round in Washington next week to help hurry things up.
The most recent leaked text shows that progress is being made on the details while some major disagreements (mainly around the scope of the agreement – should an anti-counterfeiting agreement also include patents and geographic indications) are yet to be resolved.
In our last summary article about ACTA we raised five issues where we thought that the treaty was a threat to justice and civil liberties.
It’s a pretty scary thing to receive a legal letter from the law firm of a large corporate, especially when they claim that you’re in breach of their rights and then make a series of demands. Going to court is very expensive and even if you’re in the right, do you have enough money to be a test case? If you lose you might end up not only having to pay your own costs but those of the company who sued you. The threat of legal action is pretty intimidating for most people.
Sky TV is currently sending such letters to a number of people (see an example here). These are their own paying customers, who just want to watch Sky TV on their home-made entertainment systems. So why is Sky doing it? Before we can answer that question we’ll have to explain a little bit about electronic program guides. Continue reading Sky’s Takedown Notices – Justice or Intimidation?→
Jonathan Penney, the Cyberlaw Fellow at Victoria University gave a public talk about the idea of “internet as a right” and whether there is any basis for this in current New Zealand law.
He started by looking at s14 of the 1990 Bill of Rights Act. This is about freedom of expression:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.
You’re probably aware that Google has been mapping the location of everyone’s wireless network access points. You may not be aware that other companies, such as Skyhook, have been doing the same thing for quite a while. They both use the information to help work out where you are so that their mapping applications work faster and more accurately. Continue reading Technology unveils past secrets→
We’ve been writing about the ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty for a while. We believe that copyright law and enforcement will need to change but also believe that everyone should participate in creating new laws, not just big business and their proxies. As such, we strongly objected to the secrecy around the negotiations and called for New Zealand to withdraw. We also made a submission to the Ministry of Economic Development about the digital enforcement provisions section.
The secrecy around ACTA caused problems for critics because, while much of the contents had been leaked, it was difficult to analyse the draft treaty without solid information. This all changed after the last meeting in Wellington, where global public pressure forced them to release the current draft (pdf) of the treaty.
Now we have the text to look at, were our fears justified? In this article we concentrate on some of the ways that the draft ACTA treaty encroaches on our civil liberties. Continue reading ACTA: Bad for Civil Liberties→