Proposed Final ACTA Text Published

ciaran_o_riordan writes "The US Trade Representative has published a text which, subject only to a last legal review, is proposed to be the final text of ACTA. The differences between this text and last month's, from the Tokyo round, are mostly cosmetic but there's an important positive change giving signatories the option of excluding patents from section 2. As for software patents, most harm has been avoided. If signatories make use of the section 2 exclusion option, there might be no harm at all. Lobbying for this will be important. Meanwhile, the many problems regarding Digital Restrictions Management, and the extra powers given to businesses to obtain personal and identifying information about accused copyright infringers "in the Digital Environment" are still there (mostly section 5). Earlier texts were much worse. The improvements in recent months are surely due to public outcry, leaving us indebted to the anonymous friends who scanned and leaked the various secret versions and the activists who made text versions and spread them across the Internet. There's a chance we can still influence the text in this legal review phase, but the bigger task ahead will be working on the national implementations. It's not yet clear what procedure the US will require for its own ratification."

Comments

Copyrights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, the original goal of copyright was to give exclusive copy rights to the authors for a limited period in exchange for their work to become public domain after that limited period.

A lot more people would agree to abide by copyright laws if they had not been twisted into the lifetime + 50 years locks that they are now.

Re:No problem here

[idontgno]

I know that Slashdot frowns on this kind of thing, but if you'd followed the last link in TFS, you would have discovered that the US Trade Representative has declared that ACTA will take effect in the US by Executive Order. Why? 'Cuz they said so.

That's right, folks, it's a treaty, but it's not a treaty! So that little part of the U.S. Constitution requiring ratification by the Senate doesn't apply! Really! This is not the treaty you're looking for!