For a while now, I’ve been following ACTA, or, the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”. For those of you who don’t know, this is an International agreement which could have a similar effect to SOPA / PIPA. This agreement has already been signed by almost every country in the western world (including the USA), with the exception of a few European states.
According to a recent article by PCWorld, “22 European Union member states have signed the international accord, which aims to strengthen copyright and intellectual-property rights enforcement. But opponents of the deal say it leaves the door open for countries to force Internet service providers to become the unofficial police of the Internet.”
In many ways, though, ACTA is worse than SOPA and PIPA. For one thing, because SOPA and PIPA were U.S. only laws, however ACTA is an international treaty, and thus isn’t subjected to the same standards of transparency. Most of what was in ACTA was mystery, and would have remained so, if not for Wiki leaks.
An article by International Business Times states, “ACTA, meanwhile, would set up an international legal framework to deal with issues of counterfeiting, piracy and other crimes. Instead of dealing with individual nation’s laws regarding these issues, if ACTA is passed, countries would be able to adjudicate these crimes in a new governing body that would exist outside of the purview of the United Nations and other international institutions. This opens up the possibility for ACTA to be used to crack down on Internet activity worldwide by a coordinated authority that rests outside of any country. SOPA, meanwhile, would have been enforced by existing American agencies, and would have been subject to legal scrutiny and constitutional challenges within the U.S. judiciary system.”
Translation: ACTA, if or when ratified, could be used to create a global “internet police”, not accountable to the U.N., (they would be able to shut down ISPs that hosted sites “suspected” of hosting “pirated material”, rather arbitrarily in a SOPA/PIPA-like fashion.
Fortunately, there’s hope. “Cyprus, Estonia, The Netherlands, Germany and Slovakia have yet to sign the agreement and whether they will still do so with protests spreading remains to be seen. However anti-ACTA activists see the European Parliament as their last bastion of hope. The deal must get Parliament’s approval before it can be adopted in the E.U. And a large number of parliamentarians are on the record as being against it.”(PCWorld Article)
It’s a little too late for people in the U.S. to do much about this, but hopefully those fighting the good fight in Europe can either get their respective countries to refuse to sign it, or, get it shelved in the E.U. Parliament.
