With the Wellington round of the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) on the table "in secret" this week, InternetNZ hosted the PublicACTA conference at the Wellington Town Hall Civic Suites, Sat 10th April 2010.
I managed to make it along to the keynotes on Saturday morning and also followed it on the live stream throughout the day.
The goal was to pull together a declaration to be presented to the negotiators at ACTA and call for more transparency and public consultation.
The so called "anti-counterfeiting" trade agreement really takes more action on digital copyrights, trademarks and patent infringement than dealing with the sort of counterfeiting that we normally associate with the word, that is "he problem of large-scale commercial infringement, for profit, that is direct and intentional" (PublicACTA Wellington Declaration, 2010).
Instead it seeks enforce criminal liability, statutory damages and possible Internet connection termination for BOTH commercial and non-commercial "infringements" utilising intermediaries such as ISP's, public Internet access points, workplaces, website hosting to do the dirty work.
I could go on about the concerns of this agreement but really it is un-required and will not offer benefits to any parties that it seeks to protect (See Kimberlee Weatheral's and Micheal Giest's keynotes from Public ACTA available from the PublicACTA website for more information).
The key issues, concerns and then subsequently suggestions from the 120 people that attended the conference (as well as many hundreds more following along at home on the live video stream and twitter hash tag #PublicACTA) have been complied and crafted into a concise declaration to what we as Internet professionals, consumers, producers, freaks and geeks would like to see taken on board within the Wellington negotiation round of ACTA.
The declaration and petition can be accessed here, please take the time to read through and sign the petition if you are in favour of fair democratic process and your rights as consumers of digital content.
Let's start a movement.. like this guy...
PublicACTA copyright InternetNZ and is used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
I managed to make it along to the keynotes on Saturday morning and also followed it on the live stream throughout the day.
The goal was to pull together a declaration to be presented to the negotiators at ACTA and call for more transparency and public consultation.
The so called "anti-counterfeiting" trade agreement really takes more action on digital copyrights, trademarks and patent infringement than dealing with the sort of counterfeiting that we normally associate with the word, that is "he problem of large-scale commercial infringement, for profit, that is direct and intentional" (PublicACTA Wellington Declaration, 2010).
Instead it seeks enforce criminal liability, statutory damages and possible Internet connection termination for BOTH commercial and non-commercial "infringements" utilising intermediaries such as ISP's, public Internet access points, workplaces, website hosting to do the dirty work.
I could go on about the concerns of this agreement but really it is un-required and will not offer benefits to any parties that it seeks to protect (See Kimberlee Weatheral's and Micheal Giest's keynotes from Public ACTA available from the PublicACTA website for more information).
The key issues, concerns and then subsequently suggestions from the 120 people that attended the conference (as well as many hundreds more following along at home on the live video stream and twitter hash tag #PublicACTA) have been complied and crafted into a concise declaration to what we as Internet professionals, consumers, producers, freaks and geeks would like to see taken on board within the Wellington negotiation round of ACTA.
The declaration and petition can be accessed here, please take the time to read through and sign the petition if you are in favour of fair democratic process and your rights as consumers of digital content.
Let's start a movement.. like this guy...
PublicACTA copyright InternetNZ and is used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
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