108. The representative of Canada agreed with Australia that, it would be wise to use the proposals' actual language in the report. Secondly, he agreed with others that the joint proposal had real effects for participating Members.
109. In view of its own direct experience with the EC in negotiating the bilateral wines and spirits agreement, his delegation had reasons to be concerned about the consequences of the fundamental legal changes envisaged by the EC proposal. In that proposal, the EC was asking Members to accept all GIs notified to the system as being valid GIs according to the definition in Article. 22.1 of the TRIPS Agreement. However, in the negotiation of the bilateral agreement the EC had provided a list of approximately 10,000 names, supposedly wines and spirits GIs, and it had been difficult and time-consuming for Canada to analyse each of these names and determine whether they were eligible for protection. After analysis, only approximately 1,500 names had qualified for consideration for protection, the rest had failed because they had either not been for a wine or a spirit, they were not GIs, or they had not been protected in their own country. The EC was asking other Members to accept in good faith that anything notified to the system would constitute a wine and spirit GI unless proven otherwise, that any GI notified to the system could not be considered generic, unless it was proven to be generic in those other Members. This turned Article 24.6 of the TRIPS Agreement on its head and ignored the fundamental territorial aspect of this provision, which deferred to the perception of customary use of a term in the country where the GI was being used rather than where a product was being produced. For these reasons, his delegation believed that all Members should be concerned about the consequences of the EC proposal.
110. Finally, while the issue of costs and burdens might well be covered in a different part of the Chairman's report, he wanted to point out that the EC proposal envisaged costs not only for governments, IP users and IP offices, but also for people who never before would have thought of having to incur costs in the IP system, such as producers of generic goods. This was another consequence of the EC proposal that Members should be concerned about.
