To ACTA or Not To ACTA

That is the question this September where 27 nations including the US will try to enact the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA deals with “piracy over the Internet,” which includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, censorship and downloading. This treaty would create a global organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, to control globally copyright and intellectual property rights.

President Obama earlier this year has already expressed support for the agreement, saying it was necessary to protect American businesses and technologies. If that’s the case, Obama is justified for it’s his job to protect American interests. When intellectual property is copied by foreign entities it’s means lost jobs for American workers.

U.S. movie, music, software and other copyright-based industries calculate a loss of more than $16 billion in sales every year from pirated versions of their products. Many of these counterfeit and pirated goods are made in China.

Unfortunately, China, where in 2006 the US filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization for inadequate enforcement of copyright protections, is not part of ACTA. In fact, China just might use ACTA to justify their “great firewall” of censorship, and many ACTA critics here fear that any signatory nation could use it to justify censorship as well.

But, ACTA critics also fear far worse. According to www.anti-acta.com, ACTA would overrule any law in a signatory country, and deal harsher, unfair and ineffective punishment to anyone suspected of piracy, all without a court trial. And it could be anyone who is just suspected of listening or uploading a song illegally. Watch out teenagers. It’d be better to be a stopped as an illegal on his way to getting an ice cream cone in Arizona.

But, ACTA doesn’t just go after an errant urchin or two. It also makes Internet Service Providers (ISP) legally responsible for their user’s downloaded content. ISPs could become worse than Windows Vista, but instead of the constant, “Did you initiate that action?” Questioning instead would be, “Do you own this song’s legal copyright?” Or worse still, “Are you the artist formally known as Prince?”

If not, an otherwise innocent Internet interloper could quickly find himself a criminal and incur a huge fine. Recently, the RIAA (Recording Industries Association of America) sued a 12 year old girl for downloading. And RIAA only seeks $150,000 per song violation.

International negotiations on ACTA have largely been done secretly. It’s another ObamaCare moment. We’ll only find out what’s in the treaty after it’s be ratified. Luckily, the agreement has been leaked and already several European privacy organizations have wrote an open letter that stated, “The current draft of ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy.”

One organization went further arguing, “ACTA will create a culture of surveillance and suspicion.” Aaron Shaw, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, argues that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”

For its part the European Commission in 2008 denied that negotiations were undertaken in secret. Their explanation was, “For reasons of efficiency, it is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public.” In other words, it’s not secrecy; it’s efficiency that things are done without public scrutiny.

Their idea of public disclosure is simply announcing negotiations are taking place but not the results. Now that’s where Democrats got the idea on how to pass ObamaCare. However, it’s not like ACTA is the war plans for the D-day invasion. Secrecy only breeds distrust, and from the agreement’s leak now we see why.

Terms like piracy use too broad of a definition, which could be interpreted as any “willful large scale infringements.” Legitimate entrepreneurs and civilians can be criminalized with excessive penalties. The following are examples of such infringements:

• a newspaper, whistle blower or blogger revealing a document,
• ambiguous cases of trademark confusion,
• parallel importation buying and selling of genuine products,
• making a product or medicine where patents have unclear scope and validity
• same with unexamined design right on the production of spare parts,
• an office worker emailing a copy of a market research report to another coworker,
• emailing a list of people violating an unexamined database right,
• a library, preserving digital sound recordings for posterity, unlawfully breaking technical protection each time it lawfully receives a sound recording,
• Youngsters enthusiastically sharing their favorite music with friends.

The end result may be a total shutdown of the Internet, one of the last vestiges of liberty on this planet. And that may very well be the true intent of ACTA.

references:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/americas/07iht-piracy.1909766.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100315/0229228556.shtml

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67J5A220100821

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

http://werebuild.eu/wiki/index.php?title=ACTA#Actors_and_lobbies

Leaked documents reveal draft text of top-secret global copyright deal
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