Antigua adopts new strategy in online gaming battle with United States

She said the once flourishing gaming industry has been ruined by US laws prohibiting and criminalising the provisions of remote gaming services from Antigua and Barbuda to consumers in the United States.

She told legislations that these laws have been held to be in violation of international law: “Accordingly, necessary arrangements would be made to the Copyright Act, the Trademark Act and the Patents Act to invoke the WTO (World Trade Organization) approved sanction by removing any protection which US intellectual property may have in Antigua and Barbuda.”

Last November, the island said it was disappointed in the latest round of talks with representatives from the Office of the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) in a bid to resolve the issue.

Antigua and Barbuda has criticised the United States since 1998 of breaching its commitments to members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) by enacting laws that prevented foreign-based operators from offering gambling and betting services to its citizens.

In 2005, the WTO ruled that Washington had violated international trade agreements by prohibiting operation of offshore Internet gambling sites. Antigua claimed that it lost US$3.4 billion a year due to the US action, but the WTO awarded the island US$21 million.

But in its final ruling, the Geneva-based WTO has allowed Antigua and Barbuda to suspend certain concessions and obligations it has under international law to the United States in respect of intellectual property rights.

Ambassador Colin Murdoch, who headed the local delegation to the latest rounds of talks with Washington, said that even if all possible elements in the US proposal were aggregated, the value of the offer would be considerably less than the US$21 million in annual damages awarded by a WTO panel back in 2007.

The Baldwin Spencer administration has appointed a WTO Gaming Negotiation Team chaired by Attorney General Justin Simon QC, and including Murdoch, who is the Permanent Secretary in the Department of Trade, Industry and Commerce.
The committee has the specific objective of designing and implementing an instrument for exercising measures that will act on the authorization for intellectual property right suspensions against US companies authorized by the WTO DSB.