At Last: Secret ACTA Draft To Be Published Soon

Today the EU Commission has published a press release concerning the 8^th round of negotiations on the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) held in Wellington, New Zealand from 12-16 April 2010. The text inter alia declares:

"[...] Overall, therefore, there was a general sense from this session that negotiations have now advanced to a point where making a draft text available to the public will help the process of reaching a final agreement. For that reason, and based on the specific momentum coming out of this meeting, participants have reached unanimous agreement that the time is right for making available to the public the consolidated text coming out of these discussions, which will reflect the substantial progress made at this round.

It is intended to release this on Wednesday 21 April. [...]"

Obviously it was high time for the proponents of the ACTA treaty to go ahead and publish some Official text as leaked drafts are already circulating on the net.

Surely such kind of transparency would not have prevailed without continous protest from various quarters against the secrecy of the ACTA negotiations as hitherto practised by the parties to the talks. It appears to be overdue that this 'coalition of the willing' gathered together in 2006 on intitative of the Administration of the former U.S. President G.W. Bush in an attempt to bypass WIPO (which had been perceived as not being sufficiently tough for effectively pushing the world towards an effective IP enforcement regime in the era of digital technologies as dreamt up by some of the U.S. copyright-based industries) now ceases their futile policy to rush an Agreement through legislative processes without need to pass a broader public discussion.