The ink on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has not yet dried and the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is already negotiating another trade agreement. This one, called the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), would cover trade in goods and services and also include a proposed chapter on intellectual property (IP). Countries negotiating the TPP are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, U.S, and Vietnam.

Among the thousands of documents revealed to the press through WikiLeaks are apparently a number that deal with copyright issues. The Spanish newspaper El País has published a number of cables from the U.S. embassy in Madrid regarding U.S. efforts on IP enforcement in Spain.

One of the most interesting is this one from February 2008, which recommended that the U.S. threatened to put Spain on the Special 301 “naughty list” unless the Spanish government announced it would adopt a three-strikes style copyright enforcement law that would cut users off from the Internet after allegations of copyright infringement.

The U.S. portrays itself as a bastion of free speech. Yet when it comes to copyright policy, both domestic and international, the government too often puts on blinders and refuses to see how copyright policies adversely impact free speech. It views stronger, longer copyrights as goals to aspire for and harsher enforcement measures as means to accomplish these goals. Domestically, this has resulted in copyright being used as a pretext to stifle political speech by taking down political campaign videos. Internationally, it has resulted in copyright being used as a pretext to crack down on dissidents. For instance, Russian authorities seized computers belonging to an environmental group critical of the government under the pretext that they housed unauthorized Microsoft software.

Today the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released the finalized text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), claiming to smooth out disagreements among the negotiating parties. However, our concerns with respect to some provisions remain. I had outlined these concerns in my previous post.

Changes in the new text