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LEGAL REPOR T: INTELLECTUAL PROPER T Y the muddy waters of The road to agreement on international intellectual property rights enforcement has been neither smooth nor particularly open. BY DARY L -LYNN CARLSON P olicing and preventing the coun- terfeiting of products, medicines, music, movies, and literature in a global electronic age continues to be a challenge for intellectual property rights holders. In an attempt to develop international standards to better com- bat trade in counterfeit trademarked and copyrighted goods, Canada has joined an international consortium of countries working to develop the Anti- Counterfeiting Trade Agreement aimed at enhancing enforcement worldwide. In 2008, Canada along with the United States, Australia, the European Union and its member countries, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and Switzerland started secret negotiations of ACTA. There are now 30 countries involved in the talks. A draft of ACTA was formally, and finally, publically released in April, but only after public outcry from inter- est groups in almost all participating countries. One of the chief complaints throughout has been that the nego- 46 JULY 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com tiations for ACTA have been cloaked in secrecy and possibly threaten to infringe individual privacy rights. At points in ACTA's development, stakeholder orga- nizations from representative countries — such as music recording companies and the motion picture industry — have been invited to view and comment upon proposed drafts of ACTA as a work in progress. Despite non-disclosure agree- ments, several preliminary drafts were leaked, which prompted detractors to warn that some of the proposed treaty ACTA JUAN CARLOS SOLON