So today, I made a presentation to a class of post-grad law students from UNSW regarding copyright reform and Internet freedom. Was great to have such a receptive audience for a talk that lasted a little over an hour!
I’ve embedded the slideshow below, or click here to open it.
After publishing my last post about AJFTA, I sent the negotiating team some questions regarding the trade agreement, specifically regarding what kind of provisions the IP chapter contained. 11 days later I get another boilerplate response that doesn’t even come to close to answering, let alone acknowledging, my questions.
It’s offensive when a bilateral trade agreement is treated with more secrecy than even the TPP, so I responded reiterating that they are being much more opaque than the “international standards” they continue to cite, and so have all of their colleagues when discussing other treaties with me. I look forward to receiving a response in 3 months.
As a Pirate, I believe that international cooperation is paramount to the success of our movement. It seems, however, that when it comes to applying the other parts of our ethos: making good use of technology and innovative democratic participation, we fall flat on the international level.
I noticed that talk about the Australia-Japan Free Trade Agreement has popped up on twitter again. This reminded me that I had emailed DFAT before I had this blog to ask about this treaty. I received a pretty damn opaque response, two months after I sent the email.
Basically, AJFTA contains an IP chapter, and they will not be showing anybody the text before it is signed. That’s literally all the information in this email.
There have been some questions about the Pirate Party on Twitter lately, so I thought I’d sit down for 5 minutes before my next meeting and write down some personal perspectives on these questions and hopefully go some way to answering them.
