Confirmed ACTA-like outrageous criminal sanctions in Canada-EU Trade Agreement

[michael gurstein]

I haven't seen this discussed or even mentioned anywhere but it looks like a
major assault by stealth.

Perhaps time for Canadian civil society with an interest in Internet related
issues to begin to mobilize?

M
 
----- Themes: CETA, ACTA, COPYRIGHT, ENFORCEMENT, EU COMMISSION, KAREL DE
GUCHT

La Quadrature du Net – For immediate release

Permanent link:
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/confirmed-acta-like-outrageous-criminal-sanc
tions-in-ceta

Confirmed ACTA-like outrageous criminal sanctions in CETA!

*** Brussels, 10 October 2012 – The EU Commission has confirmed that
ACTA-like criminal sanctions are currently present in CETA, the Canada-EU
Trade Agreement. This attempt by the EU executive to impose repression of
online communications through the backdoor is unacceptable. La Quadrature du
Net calls on EU citizens to demand their governments remove copyright
provisions from CETA during the upcoming round of negotiations [1]; failing
to do so, the final text would have to be opposed as a whole. ***

The current attitude of the EU negotiators on CETA is an alarming repetition
of the blatant denial of democracy of the ACTA negotiations. Despite calls
from citizens and representatives, CETA remains confidential, both in the EU
and in Canada. In this context of non-transparency, Philipp Dupuis, the
European Commission negotiator, confirmed at a workshop held on October 10th
2012 that ACTA-like criminal sanctions were still in the CETA draft. As
usual, the Commission declines responsibility for such measures by rejecting
it on the Member States' governments (and therefore the Council of the EU)
[2], and claims it advises them to withdraw these provisions.

Without a public draft, it is impossible to trust any of the CETA
negotiators, whatever they might say to calm understandably angry citizens.
All the more since the publication a few days ago of the partially
declassified transcript of discussions [3] of the 3rd round of ACTA
negotiations in October 2008 proves citizens were right about ACTA:
negotiators did in fact design criminal sanction clauses so they would
criminalize not-for-profit practices online (our emphasis):

    “NOT DECLASSIFIED presented the text on criminal sanctions. The
formulation of this document is based on Article 61 of the TRIPS Agreement
[4], which it is designed to clarify and reinforce.

    NOT DECLASSIFIED announced that it wished to determine the
interpretation of the concept of commercial scale in Article 61 in order to
make clear that it includes large-scale counterfeiting *even if it is not
for commercial purposes*. Furthermore, it regarded (a) and (b) as possible
variations of the commercial scale concept.”

This threat to the very existence of widespread social practices, such as
non-market sharing of digital works between individuals or remix, targets
the Internet in a global way, including technical actors of the Internet
[5]. If such criminal sanctions were to remain, imposed through the backdoor
by EU governments, the CETA text would be compromised and would have to be
rejected as a whole. EU Citizens must make their governments accountable and
urge them to remove any criminal sanction and copyright-related provisions
from CETA.

“The only hard evidence on which we can base our analysis suggests the
worst: once again, the European Commission and the EU Member States
governments are trying to impose repressive measures against cultural
practices online. Broad criminal sanctions do not belong in a trade
agreement. If they appear in the final CETA text, the agreement will lose
all legitimacy and will have to be frontally opposed, like ACTA. This trend
of sneaking repressive measures through negotiated trade agreements must
stop.” declared Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of the
citizen organisation La Quadrature du Net.

* References *

1. This coming October 15th to October 26th in Brussels.
2. Criminal sanctions are the competency of Member States, which therefore
negotiated them in ACTA through the presidency of the EU. The same thing is
currently happening with CETA.
3. http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/08/st14/st14607-ex01.en08.pdf
4.
http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/analytic_index_e/trips_03_e.htm#ar
ticle61A
5. Access, hosting and service providers.