Screw transparency!

From Dan at gameslaw.net:

Gamepolitics reports via Knowledge Ecology Notes that the ESA’s VP of IP Policy, Stevan Mitchell, has been cleared for access to the ACTA negotiations. ACTA, or Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a multinational treaty-in-progress that has been developed in secret since mid-2007. It covers a fairly broad scope, but it has been confirmed to include regulation on "internet distribution and information technology." ACTA has been opposed by the Free Software Foundation and the EFF, while groups calling for greater disclosure in the agreement’s language include the Consumers Union, IP Justice, Public Knowledge, National Consumer Council, and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

There’s obviously a danger here, in that the ESA is a representative of video game publishers, whose interests involving copyright, counterfeiting and DRM are often detrimental to those of the consumers who purchase their products. Any of you following my twitter feed have surely noticed that restrictive DRM has caused me to be entirely unable to play Empire: Total War for two weeks, with no fix in sight. Unfortunately, if language from the DMCA is included in ACTA, we can look forward to a significantly more frustrating user experience in the future and a fundamentally muddled legal landscape surrounding copy-protection and anti-circumvention measures. It’s difficult enough to determine appropriate law in the U.S., it’s even worse when international law is implicated.

Except, we’ve got no clue what is on the menu for ACTA, because the discussions are still being held in secret. But we do know now that there is very little consumer representation on the “cleared access” list, compared to heavy IP industry presences from Time Warner, Cisco, ESA, RIAA, MPAA, IP Owners Association, IBM, Intel, and others. This simply can’t be good.

A FOIA request for information about ACTA was denied for national security reasons. However, Wikileaks managed to get a copy of a discussion paper about the proposed agreement. This is not the first time an information request was denied; according the Vancouver Sun, the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic filed the Canadian version of a FOIA request, but received only a document stating the title of the agreement, with everything else blacked out.