[A2k] EDRI's intervention at SCCR S2

[Ville Oksanen]

Madam Chair,

European Digital Rights represents 25 privacy and civil rights
organizations from 16 different countries all around Europe.

EDRI shares many other NGOs' position that the current non-paper is
unacceptable. As the biggest problems with the non-paper have already
been - very eloquently I must say -  addressed today by EFF, KEI, Public
Knowledge and others TAUKO and yesterday by countries like Brazil and
India, we see little benefit from reiterating this criticism.

Instead, we would like to propose a test for an acceptable treaty TAUKO
and make one more general comment on the whole process.

RAUHA

As has already been repeated countless times, the General Assembly gave
a mandate to this Committee to prepare only a signal based treaty.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no consensus what that actually means.
EDRI=92s proposal for a simple test for this criterion would be the
following: TAUKO A treaty is truly signal based, if and only if there is
absolutely no need to include a clause for the term of the protection.

More generally, EDRI believes that these negotiations were unfortunately
started many years ago in the wrong framework. Treaties that create pure
investment protection without the tiniest requirement for creativity
should not be part of the industrial rights framework, not the copyright
system. Otherwise we could as well start integrating the protection for
patents and trademarks into copyright. We realize that this criticism is
at this stage somewhat academic but especially combined with excellent
points made by IMMF, we=92d really like to question the rationality to
continue this process further to diplomatic conference.

Thank you.