The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a proposed plurilateral trade agreement which is claimed by its proponents to be in response "to the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works." The scope of ACTA is broad, including counterfeit physical goods, as well as "internet distribution and information technology".
In October 2007 the United States, the European Community, Switzerland and Japan announced that they would negotiate ACTA. Furthermore the following countries have joined the negotiations: Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Canada and the European Union. The ACTA negotiations have been conducted in secrecy until on 22 May 2008 when a discussion paper about the proposed agreement was uploaded to Wikileaks, and newspaper reports about the secret negotiations quickly followed.
Negotiations were originally anticipated to conclude by the end of 2008, however in November 2008 the European Commission stated that negotiations were likely to continue in 2009. The next (sixth) of negotiations was hosted by the Republic of Korea in Seoul on November 4 to 6, 2009. At the fifth round of negotiations, in Morocco in July 2009, participants indicated their intention was to conclude the agreement "as soon as possible in 2010". According to New Zealand ACTA would "establish a new international legal framework" and "the goal of ACTA is to set a new, higher benchmark for intellectual property rights enforcement that countries can join on a voluntary basis."
Critics argue ACTA is part of a broader strategy of venue shopping and policy laundering employed by the trade representatives of the US, EC, Japan, and other supporters of rigid intellectual property enforcement. This strategy entails negotiating for terms in international treaties that might prove too politically unpopular to pass in national assemblies. Similar terms and provisions currently appear in the World Customs Organization draft SECURE treaty, and critics have argued that the anticircumvention provisions of Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were similarly passed after policy laundering via treaties negotiated through the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Participants in The 6th Round of negotiations on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Seoul, November 4-6, 2009 reaffirmed their commitment to continue their work with the aim of concluding the agreement as soon as possible in 2010. Participants in the meeting also agreed that the next meeting - The 7th Round of negotiations - would be hosted by Mexico in January 2010. This next meeting will possibly be held at the end of January 2010 according to Mexican IMPI. According to this article, the meeting is to take place "tentatively during the week of January 25, 2010"
Read more about it here:
http://werebuild.eu/wiki/index.php?title=ACTA
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/03/24/1214239/Full-ACTA-Leak-On-Line
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/tags/acta/
http://activepolitic.com:82/blog/2009.12.04/ACTA.html
I Uploaded it to the Internet Archive, here is the direct Download Link:
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