[Advocacy Advisors] CETA [was Re: EU Monitoring Report - September 2014]

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 8:14 AM, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <
dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> What happened?
> The consolidated text of the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA) was released
> last week. [9] It contains chapters on IPR and e-commerce and rules on data
> protection. It talks a lot about Digital Rights Management, a circumvention
> prohibition thereof and a prohibition on software that can be used to
> circumvent DRM. It also has an article on IPR enforcement (Article 18),
> which foresees the seizure of property on alleged infringers, including
> blocking of bank accounts and assets. This sounds a lot like ACTA (I’d say
> about 80 percent of the text is identical). It is also intriguing, because
> we still have not harmonised copyright and enforcement rules in the EU,
> raising the question on what grounds the Commission is negotiating this
> with Canada.
> There’s also a so-called “follow the money” approach for pursuing
> infringers who knowingly violate copyright law. They can be asked to pay
> compensations which would include alleged lost profits.
>
> What comes next?
> The major question here is, if this treaty is out of scope for the
> European Commission. If it touches upon policies which are not the
> exclusive competence of the EU, it would have to be ratified by the
> European Parliament, the Council and the parliaments of the 28 Member
> States. If it falls within EU law an okay from the Parliament and Council
> would be enough.
> It is also important in light of the talks on a similar EU-US trade
> agreement (TTIP). The negotiation logic in free trade agreements is that if
> you offer something to Canada, you’ll have to offer at least the same
> conditions to the USA.


Is there any good commentary/summary elsewhere on the details of this? And
are any of the activist groups trying to organize around it?

Luis
-- 
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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