Sign the Wellington Declaration

We held PublicACTA in Wellington over the weekend. 100+ people spent a sunny Saturday in a room in the Wellington Town Hall, discussing ACTA, thinking about it, and deciding what a citizen-centred perspective should be. We live-edited a text and released it Sunday lunchtime, and called it the Wellington Declaration.

It's a sophisticated and interesting critique of ACTA, and you should take the time to read it. If you agree with it, you should sign the petition. You can find the link off the Declaration itself.

Two clear themes emerged for me.

First is transparency. These are not times in which we all go around doffing our caps to governments, and believing that they know best. Free and democratic societies demand open debates on matters of public significance. There are good global mechanisms already in place to negotiate rules about copyright, trademark and patent law in public, where we can scrutinise the process and chip in our views. WIPO is a good example. The negotiators in Wellington need to make a simple decision: to release the draft text of ACTA after each round, including this one, so we can all talk about it.

Second was the complete understanding that counterfeiting is a real problem, and needs to be tackled. There are, for instance, public safety and health risks from medicines being held out as legitimate, trademarked material, but actually being dangerously inadequate counterfeit goods. ACTA should tackle counterfeiting. It shouldn't get into toughening the protections of copyright and trademarks on the Internet. To justify doing so would require evidence there is a problem to be solved. While some infringement does occur online, the movie and music industries continue to power ahead. The public interest is to see content created and shared. That seems to be happening just fine.

The more voices that add to the "Transparency, and Stick to Counterfeiting" chorus, the better. 

Will you add yours?