Fed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.
Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.
In other words, existing international institutions, where countries like Brazil, China, and India have recently acquired some real power, will be bypassed to create the tough new restrictions in ACTA.
ACTA's rules are clearly meant to apply to countries like India down the line. As Canadian law professor Michael Geist puts it, "The reality is that ACTA is largely designed to apply to the very countries that are now preparing to openly oppose it... The best approach to gaining broader acceptance is to include those countries in the talks, not leave them on the outside in the hope of later pressuring them to comply with an agreement from which they were deliberately excluded."
India hopes to derail the whole process. According a new report in India Times, the country's leaders want to form their own anti-ACTA coalition.
"We will hold talks with like-minded countries (read Brazil, China, Egypt, etc.) and may oppose the ACTA proposal jointly as well as individually by holding talks with countries involved," said an anonymous government official.
India doesn't worry so much about ACTA's much-discussed Internet section, but about issues like pharmaceutical production. According to the paper, infringement could occur "if a medicine or product is made for which a company holds a patent in any country, no matter how unclear in scope and validity of the patent is."
Such rules could affect in-transit shipments. If an Indian drug-maker ships a batch of pills to Mexico, and those pills aren't protected by patents in either country, the shipment could still be seized by US authorities. If valid US patents apply, the shipment could be seized if it ever enters a US port on its way to Mexico.
But trying to derail the trade agreement, which is nearing completion, could be difficult for countries not involved in the process.
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