The ACTA negotiation reflects the interests of a number of countries that feel they are in the vanguard, shall we say, of protecting intellectual property rights and protecting creators' rights. The concern is that there are other countries out there for which the actual protection has fallen short of the objectives of parties such as the European Union countries or Canada, which place a high value on that. We all know that there are countries where copyright infringement has become quite widely practised.
The objective of the countries involved was to create a group that raises the bar for intellectual property rights and for intellectual property rights enforcement in particular. That was the motive behind the anti-counterfeiting agreement, the ACTA. Obviously we support that. We view ourselves as being among those who place a higher value on creators' rights. That was the reason for involvement.
I know there were issues during the negotiation about some of the transparency and the availability of draft texts. Canada was always of the view that those should have been made public, but of course they could not be made public without the agreement of all the parties. We're pleased that most of those elements eventually did get made public in such a fashion that the public did have an opportunity to comment on them.