The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and Your Digital Future
by piffey
There is a lot of controversy surrounding the recent ACTA proposals now that the 2006 document is circulating and gaining momentum. If you’ve been following tech news at all then you’ll know ACTA is an attempt to make a global DMCA-plus of sorts that would protect intellectual property rights worldwide — changing many countries existing copyright protection. The controversy lies around the fact that all of the meetings concerning the global policy proposal have been held in private and are entirely secret — leaving the public out of any possible debate on the construction of the global treaty.
As a sum-up the treaty is being debated separate from any established international organization and includes the following nations (thus far): Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America. Proposals involve third-party liability (such as ISPs as evil data Tortugas for data pirates, yarrr), obligations of countries to conform to civil and criminal penalties outlined by ACTA (renegotiating the WIPO Internet treaties and pushing further), and a three-strike system that requires data providers to disconnect you permanently from the Internet after three breaches of the ACTA.
Many critics, me among them, claim that the biggest problem with ACTA is that in establishing these global provisions we are creating a global culture of suspicion and spying. The private nature of the negotiations is bad enough, but the broad scope of the documents, if agreed upon, would establish a worldwide necessity of data monitoring — often without a warrant. Studies also show that 95% of iPod owners have at least one copied song that ACTA would make illegal. ACTA essentially turns the entire consumer base into criminals.
The number of domestic laws that would be overturned by ACTA are also staggering. An entirely new legal framework would be established through the treaty and one that essentially allowed the monitoring of IP traffic by governments. The way this works is that by making ISPs responsible for the content passing through their networks puts them in a position to come under fire. They then have to prove that they took action to stop the illegal traffic by making their records transparent to the authorities — essentially circumvention of privacy laws.
As talks continue, many U.S. Senators have started to speak out against ACTA and the need for the treaty negotiations to be transparent. Even though the U.S. set the provision for secrecy to begin with there is no reason that we couldn’t change our minds now. If you’re more curious about ACTA there are links to Michael Geist‘s excellent ACTA Guide below along with a link listing representatives, both in the EU and US, that are seeking transparency or a stop to the ACTA agreement.
ACTA Internet Guide:
Part 2: Official & Leaked Documents
Part 3: Transparency & Secrecy
More Reading? Try Cory Doctorow’s article over at Internet Evolution. It’s a great write-up of everything so far.
