Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Solicits Comments on Proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
February 20, 2008The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is seeking to negotiate an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement to strengthen international cooperation, enforcement practices, and participants’ legal frameworks to address counterfeiting and piracy. A principal goal of the ACTA would be to establish a common standard for IPR enforcement to combat global infringements of IPR particularly in the context of counterfeiting and piracy.
Comments, which must be in English, must be received on or before 5 p.m. on Friday, March 21, 2008. All comments should be sent (i) electronically, to ACTA@ustr.eop.gov, with ‘‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): Request for Public Comments” in the subject line, or (ii) by fax, to Rachel Bae, at (202) 395-3891, with a confirmation copy sent electronically to the e-mail address above.
No submissions will be accepted via postal service mail. Documents should be submitted as either WordPerfect, MS Word, Adobe Acrobat, or text (.txt) files. Supporting documentation submitted as spreadsheets is acceptable in the form of Quattro Pro or Excel files. A submitter requesting that information contained in a comment be treated as confidential business information must certify that such information is business confidential and would not customarily be released to the public by the submitter. A non-confidential version of the comment must also be provided. For any document containing business confidential information, the file name of the business confidential version should begin with the characters ‘‘BC-”, and the file name of the public version should begin with the character ‘‘P-”. The ‘‘P-” or ‘‘BC-” should be followed by the name of the submitter. Submissions should not include separate cover letters; information that might appear in a cover letter should be included in the submission itself. To the extent possible, any attachments to the submission should be included in the same file as the submission itself, and not as separate files.
For further information, contact: Rachel S. Bae, Director for Intellectual Property and Innovation, Office of the United States Trade Representative, at (202) 395-4510. A fact sheet providing further details on the ACTA can be found on the USTR Web site. The USTR requests written comments from the public concerning specific matters that should be the focus of such an agreement.
