
He continued: "This would harm our ability to protect, promote and secure an outcome in the UK's interest, and the premature release of documents that are not agreed and not fully developed may also have a negative effect on the Government's reputation."
The European Commission, which is also involved in the negotiations, said that ACTA will not go any further than current EU policies for the enforcement of intellectual property rights, and dismissed claims that ACTA will leave to border searches of iPods and other gadgets in case they contain pirated multimedia content.
"EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an iPod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this," the Commission said. Measures in ACTA that involve border security would deal with the trade of counterfeit products instead.
In December, EuroISPA, a trade association for Internet Service Providers, warned that ACTA could be used to force a policy of "graduated response" to deal with illegal file sharing. Graduated response means basically that offending users will be warned a number of times before being suspended from the ISP if the illegal file sharing persists.