NZ Government delays ACTA information response
Being a democracy geek seems a minority sport most of the time. However at OpenTech 2008 in London on Saturday it didn’t feel that way. During the UK’s Open Rights Group (ORG) session, I asked what would make a good submission to the NZ government’s public ACTA consultation.
ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which BoingBoing describes as:
a draft treaty that does away with those pesky public trade-negotiations at the United Nations (with participation from citizens’ groups and public interest groups) in favor of secret, closed-door meetings where entertainment industry giants get to give marching orders to governments in private.
Despite its title, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is not about currency counterfeiting. ACTA will specify additional international agreement on laws to detect and criminalize breaches of copyrights, patents and trademarks (so called intellectual property - but in effect copyrights, patents and trademarks are government granted monolopies on creative works, innovations, and branding, respectively).
After the ORG session, Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told me that NZ was one of the few of the countries involved in the aggreement to have a public consultation on the issue. Danny referred me to their website for EFF information about ACTA.
We have until 14 July to reply to the government consultation.
The problem is that we don’t have the text of the agreement. An Official Information Act request to gain information held by the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) was launched on 8 June. MED should have yielded information within 20 working days of the request, which would have been Monday 7 July.
However the MED are delaying their response, stating that: “Pursuant to section 15A(1)(b) of the Official Information Act 1982 I am extending the time limit for my reply to your request by 10 working days. I will reply to your request by 21 July 2008.”
In consumer terms, anti-counterfeiting laws are there to protect consumers from unsuspectingly being sold fraudulent goods. Laws in this area should not be extended to the point that unsuspecting consumers are punished.
The MED is frustrating the ability of the public to make an informed submission on this issue by delaying their delivery of information under the OIA request.
Maybe we can prevail on the MED to extend the submission period to 28 July.
