Sanction is not without precedent: Mark Mendel

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Monday June 25 2007


ANTIGUA SUN
by Patricia Campbell


Antigua & Barbuda has not earned the label “Pirates of the Caribbean” through its effort to suspend US copyright, patent and intellectual property protections.

This is the opinion of the country’s attorney at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Mark Mendel, who responded to the international press coverage of the latest move at the WTO by defending the tactic.

“You can’t criticise us under these circumstances because we have just simply played by the rules and tried to protect a legitimate domestic industry,” Mendel said. He explained that the use of such sanctions is not without precedent, noting that the US has used similar tactics themselves.


“They haven’t done it in the field of intellectual property (IP), but they’ve done it in other fields, particularly in the EC (European Community) hormones case where the EC just does not want to let hormone fed beef into the EC….

“The US brought a case against them and the EC lost and they went through all the same procedures that we have and they still didn’t back down. So the US have levied sanctions against the EC which have continued for some years and what they did was exactly what we’re doing. Not in the field of IP, but in other fields where they have banned certain imports into their country or put huge, prohibitive tariffs on them which would have the same effect as if we did that in intellectual property,” Mendel told the Antigua Sun.

He explained the measures Antigua & Barbuda is seeking to put in place should not be seen as an effort to circumvent international intellectual property protections.

He stressed that Antigua & Barbuda still hopes to see a resolution before the measures are approved and implemented.

“Hopefully we will settle before it gets to that,” Mendel said, “but if we don’t we will have to see what value we can get out of it. It could run the gamut from selling copies of Microsoft Windows to selling DVDs and it wouldn’t be pirated. It wouldn’t be illegal. We would have the sanction of the WTO to do that. But that’s not what we want to do. I want to make clear that our objective here is to get fair and reasonable access to the US gaming market.”

Nevertheless, damage control has already been started in meetings with intellectual property organisations in the US, with Antigua & Barbuda’s representatives stressing that this is the unavoidable impact of the trade dispute.

Large US companies which stand to be affected have been encouraged to lobby their governments to settle the Internet gambling matter. Antigua & Barbuda is hoping that this internal pressure will have an effect where intergovernmental talks have not.

The trade sanctions which Antigua & Barbuda is seeking to impose on the US would be the equivalent of US$3.4 billion per year.