Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissioner for Trade, gives a presentation on the tate of play of the negotiations on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) of the European Parliament, in Brussels.

Brussels

statement

meeting

Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

ACTA (T)

DE GUCHT, Karel (LDR, BE, EC)

State of play of the negotiations on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): extracts of the presentation by Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissioner for Trade

SOUNDBITE (English), Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissionner for Trade, Forstly the objectives is to address large scale infringements of intellectual property rights which have a significant commercial impact. it is not about controlling travellers on the cotent of their laptops or their computers.

SOUNDBITE (English), Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissionner for Trade, ACTA will ensure that european fashion designers, artists, or automobile manufacturers can see his rights adequatly safeguarded and confronted with counterfeiting of his creations outside Europe. third ACTA must remain in line the EU acquis including the current level of harmonization IPR enfocrcement, the e-Commerce directive the regulatory telecom framework and the applicable Eu legislation on Data protection and privacy. ACTA will not obliged its signatories to apply a three strikes rule or a gradyuate response system to fight copyright infrigement and Internet piracy as you can verify from the text. 4 We will make sure that ACTA does not hamper access to generic medecines.

SOUNDBITE (English), Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissionner for Trade, There is consensus among the ACTA negotiators that ACTA should not address control of patterns by customs which means that ACTA can not serve as a basis to interfere with trade and generic medecines, furthermore ACTA wil be consistent with the declaration on trips and public health.

SOUNDBITE (English), Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissionner for Trade, However on important areas such as enforcement at the border it is becoming clear that a consensus between the ACTA parties will only be reachable on the basis of the lowest common denominator, given the variety of use on this issue wtih the various ACTA participants.

SOUNDBITE (English), Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissionner for Trade, One of the biggest disagreement is taht most of the negotiating partners only want to protect copyrights and trademarks and they are not wiling to do so for designs and for geographical indications.I would say that this is a red line. If we do not manage to get designs and geographical indications included , then I really ask myself what would be the great benefit of this agreement. let me give an example, we recently negotiated a free trade agreement with Central America and we wanted the geographical indications to be protected and we cam to the conclusion that the americans in their free trade agreement with Central Amercia had been protecting several trademarks but the content of those trademarks were exactly the same as what we call geographical indications.

SOUNDBITE (English), Karel DE GUCHT, European Commissionner for Trade, And because the trademarks were already protected we could not protect anymore the same content by way of geographical indications or trademarks so in fact they are using trademarks for the same purpose as geographical indications and would be willing to protect trademarks but not geographical indocations , now there is a slight begining of I think some hypocrisy and I really consider this to be a red line and that is also the of the opinion of the Commission. We will now consult with the Member States what they think about it and I'll also make it clear to the US authorities that we can not swallow this.