Take a look at the support that the international big business is giving to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement with an opinion article below from BASCAP on the proposed treaty.
BASCAP & INTA Support for ACTA:
The Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Business support for an important initiative — version 12 February 2008
Intellectual property (IP) theft is a global pandemic that is
intensifying across virtually every sector of the world economy. Over
the past two decades, advances in technology and manufacturing and
growth in international trade have also created greater opportunities
for counterfeiters, pirates and organized crime syndicates to escalate
the scale and scope of their illegal operations.
Efforts by legitimate businesses and law enforcement officials have
simply not kept pace with the criminals. Previously established
international IP enforcement standards have not proven sufficient to
reduce IP theft through counterfeiting and piracy. A new, higher
benchmark for intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement is
necessary.
Despite efforts by some countries, such as the bold programs to protect
intellectual property industries in France and the United Kingdom,
individual government’s legislative guidance and budget authority often
fall far short of what is needed to protect borders, deter criminal
behavior, and prosecute criminals.
Given the challenges to significantly improve the level of the world’s
national IP enforcement regimes, the proposal for the
Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a welcome and encouraging
step to fill some of the gaps in current bi-lateral and multi-lateral
agreements. ACTA has the potential to deliver significant improvements
in establishing stronger international guidelines and standards and
providing individual governments with clear directives for action.
Expectations for ACTA are high. Governments around the world must take
concrete actions to curb this illegal activity.
Recognizing that the parties negotiating ACTA are at early stages in
their discussions, the business community would like to layout a
framework for support and indicate its expectations:
* We generally endorse the need for a multilateral treaty to
suppress the offenses of trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy.
Therefore, we endorse each of the broad categories proposed in the
negotiating terms of ACTA. Commitments to strengthen international
cooperation, improve enforcement practices and provide a strong legal
framework for IPR enforcement, including criminal sanctions, border
measures, and civil enforcement are all necessary elements of an
effective IP enforcement regime. We urge negotiators to maintain the
comprehensive categorical approach to ACTA and to avoid parochial
compromises that will limit the scope and effectiveness of the final
agreement.
* We believe there are a number of areas that should be made more
prominent among ACTA provisions, such as counterfeits on the Internet,
transshipment and adjudication.
* To ensure that ACTA goes beyond the current level of available
guidance and provides parties with clear and authoritative guidance at
the national level, ACTA must rigorously deliver tangible results in the
following areas:
o Require that each party designate a chief intellectual property
enforcement officer with high-level authority to raise the profile of
the issue, oversee coordination of relevant government officials and
agencies, and allocate necessary financial and personnel resources.
o Ensure that criminal penalties for IP theft - at a minimum -
reflect the magnitude of the crime and match existing legal penalties
for theft of physical merchandise and that these penalties be applied to
both online and off-line transactions. In doing so, parties should
establish minimum effective standards for calculating these fines and
damages.
o Disrupt the flow of counterfeit goods through Free Trade Zones
and other transshipment sites by extending greater authority to local
Customs and enforcement authorities to inspect all shipments, detain
suspicious shipments, and seize and destroy all goods identified by
rights holders as infringing.
o Expand the powers of national customs authorities to be able to
interdict and stop shipments entering or exiting their jurisdictions
based on legally accepted and recognized terms of probable cause and
acting on reliable sources of information. Any strong border control
regime requires governments to significantly increase inspections of
exports to find shipments of counterfeit or pirated goods and refer
those cases to appropriate authorities for investigation and
prosecution.
o Develop global "minimum standards" in the area of adjudication
of infringement cases presented to authorities. Build capacity by
reforming civil and judicial processes and ensuring that judges have
training, prosecutors have minimum basis for prosecution and that there
are adequate jails. Increase police, customs and prosecutor training and
resources as well as establishing a specialized judiciary for effective
IPR enforcement.
o Restrict the advertising and sale of counterfeits via the
Internet in coordination with industry self-regulated efforts to ensure
that counterfeit and pirated products do not infiltrate the marketplace.
o Treat counterfeiting and piracy crossing national borders as a
transnational crime, recognizing that organized criminals are behind the
commercial level counterfeiting trade. As a transnational crime,
physical and financial assets may be seized and the crime of trademark
counterfeiting would be required to be treated as an extraditable
offence.
* The parties negotiating ACTA have an important opportunity to
educate other countries on the harms associated with counterfeiting and
piracy and the economic opportunities associated with creating a system
that promotes and protects innovation. Parties should assist other
countries with developing assessments of the economic and social
benefits of participating in the ACTA process.
* Governments must warn consumers about the harms of counterfeit
products. One must look no further than public education campaigns on
the harms of AIDS or drug abuse to understand the role governments can
play in educating their constituencies on the immediate and extenuating
dangers and risks of producing, distributing, marketing, purchasing and
consuming counterfeit and pirate products.
Negotiating an agreement of this magnitude will certainly require
significant detailed and expert work. It is essential that this renewed
effort by the governments engaging in ACTA incorporate the views of the
business community. The business community stands ready to work with
ACTA partners to create an improved and effective framework for
enforcement by providing input and counsel on substantive
anti-counterfeiting issues and by creating a forum where business work
together to contribute to ACTA.
ACTA is a critical step in the right direction. The undersigned
associations express a hope that clear decisions and actions by the
governments involved in the development of ACTA will establish the
strong, clear and long overdue global standards on enforcement and
governmental cooperation on IP crimes.