La Quadrature du Net

Timeline

Futur

  • April 2010 - Seventh round of negotiations to be held in Wellington, New Zealand

Present

  • January 26th-29th, 2010 - Sixth round of negotiations held in Mexico

Past

  • November 3rd-6th, 2009 - Fifith round of negotiations held in Seoul, South Korea
  • March 2009 - The European Parliament passes a resolution calling for the public availability of all ACTA materials. The U.S. government denies requests for access to ACTA documents on national security grounds but promises to review its approach.
  • December 15 - 18th, 2008 - Fourth round of negotiations held in Paris, France
  • October 8th and 9th, 2008 - Third round of negotiations held in Tokyo, Japan
  • July 29 - 31st, 2008 - Second round of negotiations held in Washington, DC
  • June 3rd and 4th, 2008 - First round of negotiations held in Geneva
  • November 2007 - April 2008 - Governments conduct initial consultations on ACTA.
  • October 2007 - The United States, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Canada announce plans to negotiate ACTA.

ACTA

Since Spring 2008, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries have been secretly negotiating a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Specifically, leaked documents show that one of the major goal of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of three-strikes schemes and net filtering practices.

At a time when important debates are taking place on the need to adapt copyright to the digital age, this treaty would bypass democratic processes in order to enforce a fundamentally irrelevant regulatory regime. It would profoundly alter the very nature of the Internet as we know it by putting an end to Net neutrality.

See the most worrying provisions under discussions.