International trade agreements and intellectual property

ACTA showed us how intellectual property and copyright policy may become embroiled in trade policy. Since the demise of ACTA in the European Union, following the European Parliament's rejection of it, there have been attempts to slide it in to other trade agreements. Notably, the US in its update of the NAFTA agreement known as USMCA, has an updated chapter on IPR enforcement. It was under discussion for the proposed US-UK agreement, but this has been put on hold under the Biden Administration. I have likewise put any posts on this deal on hold.

If you like the articles in this section and you are interested in ACTA and copyright enforcement policy, you may like my books A Copyright Masquerade: How Corporate Lobbying Threatens Online Freedoms and The Copyright Enforcement Enigma - Internet Politics and the ‘Telecoms Package’

The Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) and Hollywood’s Holy Grail

Monica Horten

Published on 14 November 2013

The Hollywood studios have been fighting for several years to get the ISPs to do their dirty work. Will they succeed in the TPP?

The Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) is the battleground for the next stage in the Internet wars, if the text that has just leaked is correct. In it is a toxic potion that would force the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to police their networks, and turns current law on its head. This potion is subject to a fight between the USA and Australia – who have concocted it – and Canada who won’t swallow it.

EU-US trade talks - soft words but what’s the real IPR agenda?

Monica Horten

Published on 24 June 2013

The EU mandate for the TTIP trade talks with the US indicates that ‘issues related to intellectual property right’s (IPR) will form part of the discussions. The bureacrats in charge of the talks have managed to draft a text that looks quite benign, designed to fool the politicians and the uninitiated. But when decoded, it would seem to amount to the same old enforcement agenda.

EU-US trade talks: Parliament TTIP-toes around IPR & culture

Monica Horten

Published on 23 May 2013

The European Parliament has today established its position on the EU-US Trade agreement. In the post-ACTA environment, its stance on copyright is waivering, as is the issue of transparency in the negotiations. But, unlike ACTA, TTIP is a broadly-scoped agreement, and the copyright industries are the subject of a quite different controversy – the so-called cultural exception. Moreover, another telecoms issue appears to have been entirely ignored.

Iptegrity in brief

Iptegrity.com is the website of Dr Monica Horten. I’ve been analysing analysing digital policy since 2008. Way back then, I identified how issues around rights can influence Internet policy, and that has been a thread throughout all of my research. I hold a PhD in EU Communications Policy from the University of Westminster (2010), and a Post-graduate diploma in marketing. I’ve served as an independent expert on the Council of Europe Committee on Internet Freedoms, and was involved in a capacity building project in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. I am currently (from June 2022) Policy Manager - Freedom of Expression, with the Open Rights Group. For more, see About Iptegrity