In the interests of transparency and public interest, the New Zealand Government should reveal the text of recent secret discussions in South Korea on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
In the interests of transparency, I will release today the content of discussions held last week in the Commerce Select Committee on this issue. The transcript was only made public this week.
There’s a lot of agitation and unease building around this locally and overseas, in light of the unknown outcome of the Government’s re-write of controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Act which is overdue for release. People have been speculating that the delay is linked to the ACTA discussions. The Government has said it isn’t.
Labour is keen for public discussion and input on ACTA, and for the government to acknowledge this and release the content of the negotiations to date.
New Zealand is participating in the discussions along with Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States.
The NZ Herald reported in November that while the US government claims ACTA is about counterfeiting rather than major changes to copyright law, and shouldn’t be subject to public scrutiny, leaked versions of ACTA discussion papers seem to indicate that copyright lobby organisations may have in fact turned treaty negotiations to suit their own agenda.
Labour has taken a strong position on copyright this year, understanding the importance of public discussion and the needs for all stakeholders to be taken into account and a fair outcome reached.
To view what was said by the Ministry of Economic Development officials in last week’s select committee click below.
Further questions submitted from the select committee to MED are here.
Hansard transcript: 2008/09 financial review of Ministry of Economic Development
Commerce Committee
26 November 2009
Curran: My question is with relation to the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, and also copyright—section 92A. Are MED officials participating in the ACTA negotiations?
Smol: Yes.
Curran: I understand that those negotiations have been conducted in secrecy. Will the text of those negotiations be made public?
McLeod: The nature of international negotiations is that they have to be conducted in secrecy because they are a negotiation. If you start bringing them out into the public arena, it almost becomes impossible to conduct. This is just a case of all our negotiations. In this particular case, we recognise that there is a very strong public interest in the actual content of the negotiations, so we would see there being a strong onus on us to consult very closely about the types of approaches we are going to take within that negotiation.
Curran: Consult?
McLeod: Consult domestic stakeholders in New Zealand.
At the moment my understanding is that the ACTA negotiations are still working up the kinds of frameworks that will be used in terms of looking at the issues concerned. I think once we have a bit more clarity on what those
are—because even though they have a number of rounds, it is still relatively
early—we need to go to quite a specific target of consultation with
interested stakeholders.
Curran: Can I ask, then, what is the possible relationship, because this is the
question that is being asked, between ACTA and the free-trade agreement
with the USA? That is one question. Is it likely that we will have to make
concessions that run counter to the recent consultations that the
Government has had on rewriting section 92A of the Copyright Act in
order to achieve a free-trade agreement with the USA, as the Prime
Minister, John Key, suggested in March this year? I have the quote he used.
McLeod Well, there is quite a close relationship between ACTA and the Trans-
Pacific Partnership negotiation, which includes the United States—there are
eight countries involved.
Curran: So quite a close relationship?
McLeod: Yes, in the sense that the United States is in both, and they have the same policy positions in both settings so there is no point in hiding the fact that there is a close relationship in the sense that they will be looking for a
consistent environment to be achieved through both mechanisms, as will
we. I mean, we are a partner in both.
On the section 92A question that you ask, the answer is difficult to give. I
just do not know how the United States is going to approach this issue,
either in TPP or in ACTA as yet, in that they have not come to a definitive
negotiating position even in ACTA. It is also very early days, as you know,
internationally in terms of putting place these kinds of provisions, and a lot
of people are looking at New Zealand in terms of how we do it and
whether we can provide something of a model for others to follow. The
strong hope that we would have is that the kinds of provisions that we are
going to recommend shortly—and that, hopefully, the Minister will propose
shortly to Parliament—will be enough in terms of any further concessions
sought from us from the United States, etc. I think that in terms of the
kinds of bases that the US wants hit, we will hit them but we will still have
enough safeguards to protect the interests of users as well as owners.
Curran: So there is a relationship between the delay in releasing the revised
legislation for section 92A?
McLeod: No, there is not. I would not say that we are significantly delayed.
Curran: Well, it was supposed to be the end of October.
McLeod: No, the delay is due not to that, at all. We are proceeding. It is due to the fact that we have got some fairly challenging institutional and budgetary
issues to sort through in terms of making it work. We would rather do that
properly, rather than sort of rush it into the environment. Our strong
commitment is to have something up in the public arena before Christmas.
Curran: Before Christmas? We will be submitting some more questions around that issue.
First Rich!
Good on you for pursuing this Clare.
Speedy Spud. I wasn’t going to post ‘cos it all looks a bit boring for a Friday.
Second!
Good work Clare, keep working on them.
Damn! not second, thats whats happensd when i forget to refresh my page before commenting lol
You still get the bronze.
yah! lol
great work. Thanks!!
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by clarecurranmp: What’s the need for NZ Govt secrecy on ACTA? http://tinyurl.com/yhup8f2…
I expect that MED and the Parliamentary drafters that are charged with producing the bill to amend s92A are finding it quite challenging. Issues such “who is an ISP?”, “who is a subscriber?” “what do we mean by an internet account (voice vs data vs bundled)” “what exactly will due process look like?” “who will pay for the process?” etc are all very complex when you get down to the detail, as the TCF found when trying to design its original response to s92A.
Which raises another issue – the detail of the process will be critical but I expect that it will be contained in regulations. It will be impossible to judge the efficacy and fairness of a new s92A without those regulations also being available for scrutiny and feedback at the same time. The history of s92A is of course one of last minute fundamental changes being made by way of SOP without public input and I would not want to see that happen again by use of a regulation making power.
uberVU – social comments-that link didnt work.
@James Yes it does. try another browser Firefox works
Thanks very much Clare.
may this bill die a quick and painful death before we, the global citizens, subsidise the american entertainment industry anymore
Note to politicians: in a democratic society you have to be very careful not to a) lie to the electorate and b) get caught out. Secrecy and tap-dancing around semantics sound suspiciously like a) above. Be warned: this is not the US of A.
Does anyone else get annoyed by the term ‘domestic stakeholders’?
It is jargon like this that contributes to the atmosphere of elitism and the feeling that the public is just another interest group to placate. It is on behalf of New Zealanders these deals are being negotiated, I think sometimes ministers and their departments need to remember this.
Bigbert: Simple rule. You dont’t need to be worried about getting caught out if you are transparent all the way.
This is all about top-down control.
We seem to have skipped the part where we look at the evidence (there isn’t any) that file-sharing hurts sales… and have gone straight to the part where we swallow (and follow) the corporate line that our prime conduit for sharing culture is “piracy” and should be made illegal.
This is the same industry that created the payola system, shutting out small labels. This is the same industry that is now competing with a multi-billion dollar gaming industry – ignoring the obvious fact that this might cause a loss in sales. This is the same industry that decided back in the 90s that their best returns came from getting singing models to perform songs they already “owned”.
This is the same industry that also tried to ban/control cassettes, video and even radio.
They’ve lied and exploited every single step of the way… and now our elected representatives appear to be blandly accepting their arguments as facts… that must be forced into law.
Well I don’t accept it.
Nick
ps: I’m a musician.
Clare, Grant’s thread is going to hit 100 comments soon, is that a record for Red Alert?
Nice one Clare, I really like the direction that the Labour Party has moved with regards to copyright. It’s an area that more voters will be paying attention to, thank you for you and your colleagues for listening to the voters and not just the lobbyists.
By the by – perhaps it’s time for the moderators on here to have a discussion amongst themselves about the sheer volume of facile posts that appear. Useful discussion is in danger of drowning.
Awesome Clare!!! why does a treaty about fake prada handbags needs to be secret?!
why does a treaty about fake prada handbags needs to be secret?!
Tradition, mostly. Foreign affairs is one of the last holdouts of the monarchist attitude that Affairs Of State are too important to be trusted to the dirty peasants, who might misunderstand the “national interest” (or rather, have very different ideas about where it lies than those who are conducting negotiations ostensibly on their behalf).
Its not just ACTA which needs to be opened up to scrutiny – its the whole rotten business of international negotiations. Because we’re citizens, not peasants.
@Idiot/Savant “Its not just ACTA which needs to be opened up to scrutiny – its the whole rotten business of international negotiations”
I think it’s a bit of a myth that ACTA is conventional international negotiations. As you can see in this blog post by Michael Geist, the lack of transparency in ACTA isn’t typical; that “WTO, WIPO, WHO, UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT, UNCTAD, OECD, Hague Conference on Private International Law, and an assortment of other conventions have all been far more open than ACTA.”
Read more at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4549/408/
Thanks for bringing this to the top of the radar pile Clare. I do like the Prada hand bag comment – good one Brenda! I just worry that legislation is being created that is not for the people by the people but the power holders who continue to ensure laws, treaties and market forces ensure their dominance. There is something obscene when a $500 hand bag costing $10 to manufacture, achieves that price simply because of a small tag or emblem. Just as it is when someone is prepared to pay that. IP and rights certainly need to be retained, though the new era of social media is changing where the power of control exists. Me thinks the “domestic stateholders” – (we are New Zealander’s Mr George Orwell) are just fodder for the treaty negotiations. So for all you musicians out there exercise your power like Dave Carroll who sent the value of United Airlines shares spiraling down with a 3 minute song on youtube within in 3 weeks during July 2009. http://tweettwins.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/dave-carrolls-youtube-song-forces-united-airlines-share-price-to-drop/
Thanks for all the comments. I intend to keep people informed about this issue, and will keep asking questions. Interesting that yesterday, after I posted on this issue, Peter Dunne issued a release calling on the government to make the text of the ACTA negotiations public
http://www.unitedfuture.org.nz/default,1286,dunne_what_are_we_signing_up_to_mr_power.sm
Did Peter want to get in on the action too? Same thing happened with copyright earlier this year as I recall.
I have asked MED (via the select committee) to elaborate on what the reasons are for the delay in releasing the revised Section 92A.
Here’s what I asked them:
1. What are the “challenging institutional and budgetary issues” that MED has had to sort through in terms of making Section 92A work.
2. What is the timetable for release of the proposed changes to Section 92A
[...] “In the interests of transparency and public interest, the New Zealand Government should reveal the text of recent secret discussions in South Korea on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA),” wrote Curran in the NZ Labour blog. [...]
Peter Dunne’s been working up to releasing something on ACTA for some time — likewise the greens..
Labour gets some credit for being first — but Labour was in power for a long long time while ACTA was being drafted. Question is, what awareness of ACTA did the last Labour government have? What ministers knew of it’s contents, and if none did, why?
Thanks Clare, make sure you keep us in the loop!
[...] “In the interests of transparency and public interest, the New Zealand Government should reveal the text of recent secret discussions in South Korea on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA),” wrote Curran in the NZ Labour blog. [...]
Thank you Clare
[...] Clare Curran has also said: In the interests of transparency and public interest, the New Zealand Government should reveal the text of recent secret discussions in South Korea on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). [...]
[...] ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently being negotiated in secrecy. New Zealand is participating in the discussions along with Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States. Red Alert posted on this two weeks ago. [...]
[...] ACTA is currently being negotiated in secrecy. New Zealand is participating in the discussions along with Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States. Red Alert posted on this before Xmas. [...]