Impacts of NAFTA on digital rights
Civil society urges trade decision-makers to
consider the impacts of NAFTA on digital rights
Organizations from Mexico, Canada and
the United States highlight the need for increased
transparency and urge the exclusion of intellectual property
provisions
August 18, 2017 –
As negotiations on the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) continue in Washington, D.C., more than
two dozen civil society organizations from Mexico, Canada
and the United States have released a joint statement (English / Español) on transparency, digital
rights, and NAFTA.
The organizations are calling on
NAFTA nations to make meaningful reforms to trade processes
to make them more transparent and responsive to public
input, and are warning that close attention must be paid to
the impact of the agreement on critical functions of the
Internet. They also urge negotiators to resist the inclusion
of intellectual property and copyright provisions.
The
United States Trade Representative (USTR) recently released its negotiating
objectives for NAFTA, highlighting digital trade as a top
priority.
“We’ve seen firsthand how a complete
lack of consultation and public engagement led to the
downfall of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and a
breaking of public trust in trade processes,” said
Meghan Sali, Communications Manager at
OpenMedia. “All NAFTA nations should recognize the danger
in reproducing conditions that will inevitably lead to the
mass public rejection of yet another trade agreement.”
Jeremy Malcolm, Senior Global Policy
Analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: "It's
astonishing that far from correcting the mistakes that led
to the downfall of the TPP, the USTR is on track to
compounding those mistakes—holding no public stakeholder
events in association with the first round, and doubling
down on the secrecy of the text. What chance is there of
reaching agreement on fair, balanced rules for copyright or
digital trade, when public interest groups with important
views about those issues are being kept in the
dark?"
Burcu Kilic, legal counsel for
Access to Medicines, Innovation and Information at Public
Citizen said: “If intellectual property is not excluded
from the NAFTA talks, the IP chapter should be kept as slim
as possible and should not lead to rewriting
already-existing TRIPS-plus and NAFTA-plus standards. NAFTA
renegotiations should not serve as a forum for powerful
lobbies to continue pushing for maximalist IP standards that
fail to account for the interests of Americans, Mexicans and
Canadians.”
Gus Rossi, Global Policy
Director at Public Knowledge, said: "If NAFTA addresses
intellectual property, it is critical that user rights are
protected and the demands of rights holders are balanced.
NAFTA must maintain user protections, including exceptions
and limitations regimes and fair use. In addition, NAFTA
must be negotiated in a transparent way, in order to best
serve the public interest."
Signatories to the
statement include the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Derechos Digitales, Creative Commons, Public Citizen, Public
Knowledge and the Internet Archive.
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OpenMedia
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Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free. We create
community-driven campaigns to engage, educate, and empower
people to safeguard the
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