The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
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David Heath
Sunday, 08 November 2009 07:25
Much of it deals with agreement between the parties on cooperation and alignment of enforcement practices in the area of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and very deliberately couches most of its examples in terms of wide-scale physical product counterfeiting (the 'fake watches and handbags').
However, buried at the bottom of page three is a sub-section entitled "Internet distribution and information technology." This section has the following sub-text.
"Legal regime, including safeguards for Internet service providers (ISPs) from liability, to encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders in the removal of infringing material;
"Procedures enabling right holders who have given effective notification of a claimed infringement to expeditiously obtain information identifying the alleged infringer;
"Remedies against circumvention of technological protection measures used by copyright owners and the traffic of circumvention devices."
The clear interpretation of this is that unless ISPs cooperate fully with the authorities and the right holders in the event of a complaint by them, the ISPs will be considered to be as guilty as the alleged infringers.
The second leaked document, a seemingly official European Commission discussion paper gives a lot more detail as to the intended outcomes of the ACTA meeting. "US reported that they have been working on a draft text since the end of the 5th round (end of July) and that this was basically finalised. However, they are still involved in internal consultations with other government agencies and a number of private stakeholders (bound to strict confidentiality clauses), therefore they were not willing to share with COM (or even to show us) the text at this stage."
The discussion paper outlines a number of areas of concern. The first, which was mentioned earlier, is "ACTA members have to provide for third-party liability." In other words, ISPs can be legally held responsible for the actions of their users. In order to avoid this situation, ISPs must fold into a rigorous regime of takedown notices and also have strongly enforced policies regarding the transmission and storage of (allegedly) infringing material.
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