[Ip-health] Petition to President Obama, regarding transparency of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

[Malini Aisola]

The following is a petition to President Obama, asking that the
negotiations regarding ACTA be made more transparent. You can sign the
petition by sending a note to Malini Aisola at
malini.aisola[at]keionline.org

Signatures will be added on a rolling basis to the petition which is
available at: http://keionline.org/acta-petition

For more background on ACTA and the disputes over transparency, see the
link above.  The letter follows:


*******************
Dear Mr. President,

We are writing to express our concerns about the lack of transparency
and openness surrounding the negotiations on a new Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement (ACTA). Despite its name, the ACTA is designed as a
trade agreement that will cover a wide range of intellectual property
enforcement issues, including norms for both governments and civil
litigation, as well as criminal sanctions. While we agree that the
enforcement of intellectual property rights is very important, it is
also a complex area where the =E2=80=9Csolutions=E2=80=9D to the enforcemen=
t issues are
often controversial, and it is important to balance a variety of
competing interests, and to ensure that measures to enforce private
intellectual property rights do not undermine civil rights and privacy,
or unduly impede innovation.

Unlike nearly all other multilateral and plurilateral discussions about
intellectual property norms, the ACTA negotiations have been held in
deep secrecy. This has led to a chorus of criticism, and demands that
the ACTA process be opened up, and that documents in ACTA negotiations
be disclosed, as they are routinely in intellectual property
negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or
the World Trade Organization (WTO).

After a year of criticism over the secrecy of this negotiation, the
White House United States Trade Representative (USTR) recently began a
policy of offering some persons access to documents in this negotiation,
on the condition that they sign a non disclosure agreement (NDA) that
prevents any public discussion of the contents of those documents. The
opportunity to see the ACTA documents under the NDA was offered to a
large number of business interests, but very few public interest or
consumer groups, and there were no opportunities for academic experts or
the general public to review the documents.

USTR officials have indicated that this policy of access by invitation
and NDA fully addresses the legitimate demands for more transparency of
the negotiation, and it is being considered as a model for the future.

We are opposed to this approach because it creates a small special class
of citizens who have rights superior to the majority of the population,
and because it gives the government too much discretion in deciding who
can monitor and criticize its operations. We have no confidence in this
new approach.

Some of the people signing who have signed such NDAs are grateful for
the chance to have had special access to some information, but they also
feel constrained by the inability to discuss the contents of the
documents, and are confident that nothing they have seen constitutes
information that in any way would prejudice the national security of the
United States if it were in fact disclosed.

In our opinion, the ACTA negotiations would not exist without the
support and engagement of the U.S. government, and they are too
important to continue under such questionable practices.

The only rationale for keeping the proposed ACTA text from the public is
to suppress criticism and critical thinking about the norms that are
being proposed. It is Orwellian and an insult to our intelligence to
claim that the secrecy of the ACTA text has anything to do with national
security concerns, as the term is commonly understood.

A secret process of arbitrary access, conditioned upon signing
non-disclosure agreements to block public debate, does not enhance
openness and transparency, and does not inspire respect for the norms
that will eventually emerge.

We ask that when documents such as proposals for ACTA text are
circulated to all governments in the negotiations, and when those
documents are shared with dozens of Washington, DC insiders, they also
be shared with everyone else.

Sincerely,


To add your name, send your name and preferred identification to Malini
Aisola, at mailini.aisola@keionline.org


cc: USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk, Stan McCoy, Tim Reif

Department of Commerce, Secretary Gary Locke, David Kappos, Arti Rai,
Susan Wilson

Department of State, Hillary Clinton, Jean Bonilla

White House, Andrew McLaughlin, Susan Crawford, Vivek Kundra, Beth
Noveck, Robynn Sturm, Tom Kalil, Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra

Senators Patrick Leahy, Max Baucus, Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, Bernie
Sanders

Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Charles Rangel, Sander Levin

Department of Justice




--
Malini Aisola
Knowledge Ecology International
1621 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 500, Washington DC 20009
malini.aisola@keionline.org|Tel: +1.202.332.2670|Fax: +1.202.332.2673