The third draft of the FTAA is now online. The Revised Intellectual Property Chapter, FTAA – ALCA – ZLEA – FTAA Draft Agreement – 2003 – Chapter XX, is still crawling with brackets (meaning there is no agreement), and Art. 13, which I criticized recently, is unchanged — but now it seems the whole chapter may be optional!
Not Geniuses has links to summaries of the overall course of the negotiations. It seems to have gone in the direction of 'FTAA a la carte' — and the IP provisions appear to be among the optional ones.
Of course this means the US will step up its pressure to put IP rules into bilateral trade agreements, but overall this is still progress.
