Firstly, I’d like to say how much I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the draft agreement. So many of these treaties seem to be negotiated with no input from the citizenry they affect.

Regarding the overall process, I understand that there is the possibility of reducing the timeframe for the agreement. I think this is a very bad idea. It is far better to stick to the original plan. To do otherwise risks creating a less well-thought-out agreement and risks alienating the citizens it affects by giving the appearance of wanted to avoid giving due consideration to all the various arguments.

I was surprised to see the vast amount of material in the draft agreement devoted to Intellectual Property. This seems particularly odd given the Competition part of the draft agreement. One of the most important prerequisites for competition is that there are no monopolies, yet Intellectual Property law deliberately creates monopolies for a limited time in order to encourage creativity and the spread of ideas. Intellectual Property law is thus diametrically opposed to free competition and I personally would prefer it if the agreement focused on the competition side.

Furthermore, Intellectual Property law has to tread a very careful line in order to avoid encroaching on freedom of expression. Clearly, the works that are protected by copyright are expressive and restrictions on their reproduction are therefore restrictions on expression, albeit fairly limited restrictions. I believe that freedom of expression, being a fundamental human right, is infinitely more important than the stimulus to creativity that is intellectual property law. It is therefore imperative that each and every expansion of the rights covered by intellectual property law be clearly and unambiguously beneficial to society as a whole. Restricting people’s freedom to communicate with one another should only be done for the most compelling of reasons.

Intellectual Property law in the Americas seems to be in a state of flux at the moment. In the USA, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are both currently being challenged as being unconstitutional. The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act is currently being debated. Canada is currently in the middle of a consultation process about what changes, if any, need to be made to copyright legislation. The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and the WIPO Copyright Treaty have only recently come into force and have yet to be ratified by many of the countries involved in the FTAA process. It appears that there is much disagreement about the form that copyright law needs to take in order to be effective in a highly connected, highly digital world. The FTAA should surely be reflecting the agreed best practices rather than trying to answer these questions that the individual nation states have been working on for so long and none appears to yet have answered.

I am particularly worried that powerful industry groups in the USA seem to manage to use international treaties such as the WIPO treaties and the FTAA in order to further their own objectives of increasing the duration and scope of the copyrights they hold so as to further increase their profits. It is far from clear to me that the Americas as a whole benefit from these changes. In fact, the only beneficiaries from changes such as the DMCA in the USA are these powerful industry groups that are already making huge profits.

In summary, please keep to the original timetable. Ideally, I’d like to see the entire Intellectual Property section removed from the treaty. Failing that, it makes sense to codify only proven legislation. Do not use this treaty to make sweeping changes to Intellectual Property law.