The mis-labeled Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (which itself is counterfeit, as politicians have been entirely dishonest about the origins and content of the treaty) has again had parts of its secret contents leaked. Some details are on Michael Geist's blog.
November 3, 2009
November 4, 2008
An article by Pauline Tam in todays Ottawa Citizen seems to be pressing for a general relaxation of the requirments for search warrant.
The article having the title of "Fake IDs used to defraud health system" discusses the efforts made to locate folks who use Canada's Health care system, ththough they are not entitled to benifits from the system. However the article seems to also attempt to persuade the reader that Canada's Privacy Laws are so strong, that they hamstring attempts by Law enforcement to investigate this sort of case.
October 3, 2008
Keith Rose has noticed something interesting, which is that the US authors of the controversial Pro-IP Act criticize ACTA.
September 23, 2008
An article by Mark Drajem for Bloomberg documents how Google joined others in opposing the invalidly titled "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" in testimony before the Commerce Department in Washington on Monday.
September 15, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Press release on EssentialAction.org
September 15, 2008
**Secret Counterfeiting Treaty Must Be Made Public, Global Organizations Say**
More than 100 public interest organizations from around the world today called on officials from the countries negotiating Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – Canada, the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand -- to publish immediately the draft text of the agreement.
July 15, 2008
David Kravets offers an interesting judgement of a US 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who seemed to think his colleagues were to lenient on a defendant found guilty of selling counterfeited "access cards" that allowed customers unlawful access to DirectTV's digital satellite feed.
I also seriously doubt the access cards were counterfeit, as most of the people purchasing these know the origins and contents of what they are buying, and there is not often any attempt to deceive customers that they are from DirectTV.
June 9, 2008
Michael Geist's weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the (so-called) Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
June 8, 2008
I have had a Google Alerts for Dan McTeague for a few months, since I heard he was promoting a form of policy counterfeiting by confusing counterfeiting, commercial copyright piracy, non-commercial illegal sharing, patent, trademark, and other quite different areas of law. Most of the alerts talk about gas prices, and how he believes they should be lower.
This got me to thinking about the parallels between energy policy and copyright policy, and how Mr. McTeague, MP for Pickering-Scarborough East and the Liberal Consumer Affairs Critic, seems to not yet have an adequate understanding of these issues.
Read the rest of this entry »
June 6, 2008
An article by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch discusses the misleadingly labelled Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
ACTA’s declared goal, according to a note released after the meeting by the negotiators, is “to provide a high-level international framework that strengthens the global enforcement of intellectual property rights.”
Why then have Anti-Counterfeiting in the title, given counterfeiting is not strictly an "Intellectual Property" issue, and the use of this language seems to be to bring up support for the treaty that would not otherwise exist based on the actual non-counterfeiting related topics being discussed.
June 5, 2008
I have been wondering where Bob Rae, recently elected MP for Toronto Center, would come down on copyright, mis-labeled anti-counterfeiting, and new economy issues. Thanks to Michael Geist I have been pointed to an article by Bob Rae.
Please see the Government of Canada press release: A Cross-Canada Educational Initiative to Raise Awareness and Combat Product Counterfeiting and Copyright Piracy.
The Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network (CACN) is a lobby group with an extremely biased special interest opinion on this area of policy. The entertainment lobby (entertainment software, movies, music) are carrying out a misinformation campaign trying to equate non-profit illegal knowledge sharing by citizens, commercial copyright infringement (piracy) and counterfeiting -- policy areas that are quite distinct, and cannot be rationally merged. Given this, they will be incapable of carrying out an educational roll, as necessary as we all agree this education is.
June 4, 2008
If you look up counterfeit in Wikipedia it starts with, "A counterfeiting is an imitation that is made usually with the intent to deceptively represent its content or origins." What would you call a treaty that is being negotiated in secret, needed a Wikileaks leak to get past the fact that Access to Information requests were getting blacked out pages, is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and yet has contents which have little to nothing to do with counterfeiting?
I think we have a treaty where its very title seems to have the intent to deceptively represent its content and origins.
Within parliament we appear to have a member that is trying to get at the truth about this government counterfeiting. Charlie Angus, the NDP's digital issues critic and the sitting MP that seems to best understand digital issues, had yet another exchange with the Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. This exchange included this counterfeit treaty and the fact the Copyright bill was not to be tabled today.
Read the rest of this entry on IT World Canada's BLOG »
June 3, 2008
An article by James Love in the Huffington Post talks about the "Counterfeit treaty". This is meant in two ways: one, that this is a treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Since the name of the treaty masks the contents of the agreement which largely has nothing to do with counterfeiting, this dishonest misrepresentation of the contents can itself be considered a form of counterfeiting.
