Emmanuel slams ACTA, the proposed intellectual property rights enforcement regime masquerading as a “trade agreement.” As I’ve mentioned over the last few months [April, June], I have yet to see anyone defend this proposal.

The Princeton IES summer workshop runs today through Thursday. The agenda is online.

This statement reflects the conclusions reached at a meeting of over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents gathered at American University Washington College of Law, June 16-18, 2010. The meeting, convened by American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, was called to analyze the official text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), released for the first time in April, 2010. Negotiating parties released the text only after public criticism of the unusually closed process and widespread disquiet over the negotiations’ presumed substance. (See Wellington Declaration, EU Resolution on Transparency and State of Play of the ACTA Negotiations).

We find that the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators.

• Negotiators claim ACTA will not interfere with citizens’ fundamental rights and liberties; it will.

• They claim ACTA is consistent with the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS); it is not.

• They claim ACTA will not increase border searches or interfere with cross-border transit of legitimate generic medicines; it will.

• And they claim that ACTA does not require “graduated response” disconnections of people from the internet; however, the agreement strongly encourages such policies.

ACTA is the predictably deficient product of a deeply flawed process. What started as a relatively simple proposal to coordinate customs enforcement has transformed into a sweeping and complex new international intellectual property and internet regulation with grave consequences for the global economy and governments’ ability to promote and protect the public interest.

Hat tip to Larry.

p.s. I haven’t seen any defenses of ACTA. Is this issue as one-sided as it seems? Please provide links/papers in the comments if you know of any.

My blogging may be a bit slow through July 11. But here’s Marcus Cole of Stanford Law on nationalism, labor mobility, international organizations, and football:

To the true football fan, the World Cup itself is part of an ideological struggle between two competing corporate goliaths, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (“FIFA”) and the Union of European Football Associations (“UEFA”)…

FIFA represents the distinctly twentieth century notion that nationhood is the most important and powerful bond between humans. While nations are free to define themselves, individuals, for the most part, are not. FIFA insists upon a competition between nations qua nations, but FIFA does not demand that nations define themselves in a particular way…

UEFA also satisfies some of the thirst for nationalism, sponsoring its own competition between national teams every four years, the European Cup, in the interstices of the World Cup. But UEFA’s real claim to fame is its sponsorship of club competitions, the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europa Cup. These two competitions are between club teams, not nations. These clubs are organized, for the most part, on free association and freedom of contract…

FIFA and UEFA are openly critical of each other, and it is no secret that FIFA craves the power and success of UEFA. FIFA has tried to promote its own club competition, the World Club Cup, in which the winners of the various continental competitions around the world participate. This competition is largely ignored however, with virtually no television coverage, even in Europe. Instead, the real football world is focused annually on the Champions League, which every pre-eminent international footballer considers one of the two trophies he must hoist in a successful career. The other, of course, is FIFA’s World Cup.

But UEFA understands what FIFA does not, namely, that freedom works. National teams will never be as good, as entertaining, or as compelling as teams composed of free individuals willingly and contractually cooperating toward one common purpose. Open systems of nationality come closer to the ideal of freedom than closed systems, and the national teams themselves recognize this… The German national team boasts Cacau (a native of Brazil) and Jerome Boateng…

via IELP.

Update: Along related lines, see Emmanuel’s “German football as proof that migration works.”

Neat: “The Center for Firms in the Global Economy is a research center that aims at analyzing firm behavior in a globalized economy, with a special attention to companies in Europe as well as developing countries. The center primarily produces academic research papers but would take part in international business or public policy oriented projects.”

I’m sad to learn that Angus Maddison has passed away. (via AC)

Would a 10% appreciation of the renminbi destroy nearly half a million US jobs or create more than a quarter million?

Via IELP, a draft of ACTA has finally been made public.

Check out the clashing views on the renminbi and American jobs at Foreign Policy.

Fred Bergsten wants China to significantly revalue the renminbi (something like a 10% immediate appreciation), saying that “China is exporting large doses of unemployment to the rest of the world.” He thinks a trade correction would create a million US jobs, using a rule of thumb in which “$1 billion of exports supports about 6,000 to 8,000 (mainly high-paying manufacturing) jobs in the United States.”

Phil Levy offers the rebuttal. In normal times, most believe the trade balance doesn’t affect employment. In a recession, could the trade balance affect the unemployment rate? He points to Ray Fair’s econometric model, which suggests that Chinese undervaluation has actually created US jobs. He’s also not a fan of Bergsten’s rule of thumb.

I’m not sure the rumored/leaked “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (14MB pdf) is really a trade agreement. The provisions receiving attention make it sound much more like an intellectual property enforcement cooperation agreement. David Post says “it is really about is the tighter enforcement of copyright law on the Net.” Margot Kaminski says it “amps up IP protection and criminal sanctions, without respecting existing international institutional process and involving the interests of developing countries.”

I know nothing about ACTA. If posts from Volokh to Balkinization say it’s bad law, there’s a decent chance it is. I haven’t seen any trade bloggers analyzing the proposed deal.