Border - Credit: tobin on Flickr (CC BY-SA)
The Paris ACTA meeting has concluded, and Ars is reporting that the biggest news is that the treaty will most likely be delayed until March.
The big news was that future negotiations will include a March 2009 meeting in Morocco (one of the participating countries); barring some sort of bureaucratic miracle, we’ll have at least four months before the treaty could be ready.
In the meantime, new President Obama will have appointed a new US Trade Representative, the official who oversees the US side of the ACTA negotiations. This could affect the process, obviously, though Obama’s initial choice of LA Congressman Xavier Becerra (who has since declined the offer) suggests that Obama isn’t opposed to someone backing the interests of the movie and music industries. The two groups have real and important concerns about piracy and counterfeiting, but they have also pushed hard to stuff everything from ISP filtering to graduated response rules into ACTA.
I’m sorry, but I’m not really counting on Obamarama to make this all better. I hope that is the case though.