Just a few days have passed since European parliaments laughed ACTA out of court – but some copyright activists believe its provisions may get in through the backdoor via the CETA treaty.
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is a wide-ranging set of agreements between the EU and Canada. Only a small part of it concerns intellectual property, but this part appears to have been lifted from the drafts of ACTA.
“The European Commission strategy appears to be to use CETA as the new ACTA, burying its provisions in a broader Canadian trade agreement with the hope that the European Parliament accepts the same provisions it just rejected with the ACTA framework,” claims Michael Geist, a Canadian law professor, on his website.
Michael Geist quotes dozens of identical passages in ACTA and CETA. ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) was intended to contest online piracy and piracy in general with the rapid claims that copyright laws were not effective enough.
CETA has not yet gone before the European parliament, but with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA out of the way – this may be the next ludicrous agreement to disturb online freedom fighters such as WordMean.
Watch this space.
