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The Canadian Press reports that Industry Canada and Health Canada conducted a joint research project to estimate the cost to Canada of implementing the patent term restoration required by the leaked text. They estimated that “the EU proposal would add an average life of 2.66 years to a typical drug patent, and increase Canadian drug costs by between $795 million and $1.95 billion annually.”
The group European Digital Rights reports on an email from the Secretariat of the Council of the European Union to the Member States, which clearly states that the criminal sanctions provisions in the draft are modeled on those in ACTA.
The La Quadrature du Net has written the EU warning that “such criminal measures, broad and disproportionate, are designed to combat widespread non-market cultural practices and target Internet actors driving innovation and growth.”
Carolina Rossini of EFF writes that this is a further example of policy laundering by copyright-owning industries: “The copyright lobbies have consolidated on the use of foreign and international forums as an indirect means of pushing policies—a strategy known as policy laundering—like those ones in CETA that might never win direct approval through the regular domestic political. The move from fora like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the World Trade Organization (WTO) to bilateral and regional trade agreements confirms it.”
