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Re-post from Michael Geist's blog, who is a law professor :-
Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject ACTA, striking a major blow to the hopes of supporters who envisioned a landmark agreement that would set a new standard for intellectual property rights enforcement. The European Commission, which negotiates trade deals such as ACTA on behalf of the European Union, has vowed to revive the badly damaged agreement. Its most high-profile move has been to ask the European Court of Justice to rule on ACTA's compatibility with fundamental European freedoms with the hope that a favourable ruling could allow the European Parliament to reconsider the issue.
While the court referral has attracted the lion share of attention, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) reports that there is an alternate secret strategy in which Canada plays a key role. According to recently leaked documents, the EU plans to use the Canada - EU Trade Agreement (CETA), which is nearing its final stages of negotiation, as a backdoor mechanism to implement the ACTA provisions.
The CETA IP chapter has already attracted attention due to EU pharmaceutical patent demands that could add billions to provincial health care costs, but the bigger story may be that the same chapter features a near word-for-word replica of ACTA. According to the leaked document, dated February 2012, Canada and the EU have already agreed to incorporate many of the ACTA enforcement provisions into CETA, including the rules on general obligations on enforcement, preserving evidence, damages, injunctions, and border measure rules. One of these provisions even specifically references ACTA. A comparison table of ACTA and the leaked CETA chapter is posted below.
The EU has also proposed incorporating ACTA's criminal enforcement and co-operation chapters into CETA. The criminal provisions were the target of European Parliament criticism for their lack of proportionality and uncertain application.
Canada has similarly pushed for the inclusion of ACTA provisions, proposing identical digital lock rules as well as ACTA-style Internet service provider provisions that raised privacy concerns from the European Data Protection Supervisor. In fact, Canada would like to extend ACTA by mandating an anti-camcording provision (a similar provision is currently voluntary in ACTA).
The European Commission strategy appears to be to use CETA as the new ACTA, burying its provisions in a broader Canadian trade agreement with the hope that the European Parliament accepts the same provisions it just rejected with the ACTA framework. If successful, it would likely then argue that ACTA poses no new concerns since the same rules were approved within the Canadian trade deal.
The backdoor ACTA approach creates enormous risks for Canada's trade ambitions. Given the huge anti-ACTA movement, the Canada - EU trade deal could face widespread European opposition with CETA becoming swept up in similar protests.
With anti-ACTA sentiment spreading across Europe, Canada should push to remove the intellectual property chapter from CETA altogether. The move would not be unprecedented. Many of Canada's free trade agreements feature only limited IP provisions and last year a Canadian parliamentary committee recommended that "domestic copyright policies are not part of any present or future trade negotiations."
Meanwhile, the U.S. and EU recently announced their own plans to negotiate a trade deal but agreed to keep intellectual property issues out of the talks. If CETA becomes known as ACTA II, the future of the Canada - EU trade deal may hinge on adopting a similar approach.
Source: www.michaelgeist.ca/content/vi…
Go to source for table of comparison between ACTA and CETA-draft, and other links.
Help stamp out shady agreements like these from inside of politics pirateparty-da.deviantart.com/
I've had comments asking for permission to re-upload this.
That's a silly question. We are the internet - propagate and share media is what we do!
Michael Geist publishes his blog under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject ACTA, striking a major blow to the hopes of supporters who envisioned a landmark agreement that would set a new standard for intellectual property rights enforcement. The European Commission, which negotiates trade deals such as ACTA on behalf of the European Union, has vowed to revive the badly damaged agreement. Its most high-profile move has been to ask the European Court of Justice to rule on ACTA's compatibility with fundamental European freedoms with the hope that a favourable ruling could allow the European Parliament to reconsider the issue.
While the court referral has attracted the lion share of attention, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) reports that there is an alternate secret strategy in which Canada plays a key role. According to recently leaked documents, the EU plans to use the Canada - EU Trade Agreement (CETA), which is nearing its final stages of negotiation, as a backdoor mechanism to implement the ACTA provisions.
The CETA IP chapter has already attracted attention due to EU pharmaceutical patent demands that could add billions to provincial health care costs, but the bigger story may be that the same chapter features a near word-for-word replica of ACTA. According to the leaked document, dated February 2012, Canada and the EU have already agreed to incorporate many of the ACTA enforcement provisions into CETA, including the rules on general obligations on enforcement, preserving evidence, damages, injunctions, and border measure rules. One of these provisions even specifically references ACTA. A comparison table of ACTA and the leaked CETA chapter is posted below.
The EU has also proposed incorporating ACTA's criminal enforcement and co-operation chapters into CETA. The criminal provisions were the target of European Parliament criticism for their lack of proportionality and uncertain application.
Canada has similarly pushed for the inclusion of ACTA provisions, proposing identical digital lock rules as well as ACTA-style Internet service provider provisions that raised privacy concerns from the European Data Protection Supervisor. In fact, Canada would like to extend ACTA by mandating an anti-camcording provision (a similar provision is currently voluntary in ACTA).
The European Commission strategy appears to be to use CETA as the new ACTA, burying its provisions in a broader Canadian trade agreement with the hope that the European Parliament accepts the same provisions it just rejected with the ACTA framework. If successful, it would likely then argue that ACTA poses no new concerns since the same rules were approved within the Canadian trade deal.
The backdoor ACTA approach creates enormous risks for Canada's trade ambitions. Given the huge anti-ACTA movement, the Canada - EU trade deal could face widespread European opposition with CETA becoming swept up in similar protests.
With anti-ACTA sentiment spreading across Europe, Canada should push to remove the intellectual property chapter from CETA altogether. The move would not be unprecedented. Many of Canada's free trade agreements feature only limited IP provisions and last year a Canadian parliamentary committee recommended that "domestic copyright policies are not part of any present or future trade negotiations."
Meanwhile, the U.S. and EU recently announced their own plans to negotiate a trade deal but agreed to keep intellectual property issues out of the talks. If CETA becomes known as ACTA II, the future of the Canada - EU trade deal may hinge on adopting a similar approach.
Source: www.michaelgeist.ca/content/vi…
Go to source for table of comparison between ACTA and CETA-draft, and other links.
Help stamp out shady agreements like these from inside of politics pirateparty-da.deviantart.com/
I've had comments asking for permission to re-upload this.
That's a silly question. We are the internet - propagate and share media is what we do!
Michael Geist publishes his blog under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
TIP! Easy Way to Prevent Facebook Tracking
Facebook surveils everyone's web browsing regardless of whether they have an account or not, as described in this paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1717563
A simple way to prevent any packets being sent to or received from Facebook from your hardware is to set up filtering using iptables, a kernel-level firewall. On most GNU and Linux distributions, you can run the following three commands as root:
iptables -A INPUT -d facebook.com -j DROP
iptables -A OUTPUT -d facebook.com -j DROP
iptables -A FORWARD -d facebook.com -j DROP
The URL can be changed for other sites as well if you wish. Eg - for Twitter's "tweet" buttons run the same commands
Nationality Meme
i don't usually do these, but i'm bored so bleh :P
● BRITISH ●
[ ] You drink a lot of tea.
[ ] You know what a brolly is.
[ ] Deal or No Deal has taken over your life.
[ ] You wanted Ben to win X Factor.
[ ] You use the word "bugger"or the phrase "bloody hell."
[ ] Fish and Chips are yummy.
[ ] You can eat a Full English Breakfast.
[ ] You dislike emos almost as much as you dislike chavs.
[X] It's football... not soccer.
Total: 1
● AUSTRALIAN ●
[ ] You wear flip flops all year.
[ ] You call flipflops thongs, not flip flops.
[ ] You love a backyard barbie.
[ ] You know a barbie is not a doll.
[X] You lo
Colour IQ Challenge
Greetings all.
I found this colour test/quiz/challenge/game/thingus and thought it was somewhat appropriate to share with dA. It measures how well your eyes differentiate between colours. Don't know how accurate it is exactly, but it seems interesting.
Clicky: http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77
Comment back with your score! ^^
I got 8.
O HAI!
sorry for the silence.
i've not been anywhere photo-worthy recently, and i've got 3-4 unfinished works on my laptop with little motivation to complete them. i'll get to it eventually.
in other news, i finished uni :) and now joining the job-hunt :(
oh yeah, and the guitar i was working on from the previous post (if anyone remembers it) was finished quite a while back. pictures on UG http://profile.ultimate-guitar.com/heminder/pictures/gear/666381/666382
...and now i've run out of things to say to keep anyone mildly interested :P
so, bye bye!
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sheesh, i guess the government never heard of the 1st Amendment