For those reaching this entry from a direct link, there is news.

From IP Justice and Wikileaks,  we learn (I hope not too late) about the existence of ACTA, a new global trade agreement being drafted — mostly in secret — by the US, European Union, Switzerland, Australia, and a select handful of other wealthy nations.

The US Trade Representative (USTR) and the European Commission announced their intent to open ACTA negotiations at the end of 2007 calling it ‘a new and dynamic effort to combat the challenges of counterfeiting and piracy today.’ They invited a short list of transnational intellectual property owners and corporate lobby groups to participate in consultations and negotiations. They did not invite civil society groups or other ’stakeholders’ like libraries, educators and so on.

ACTA’s stated purpose is to protect industries based on intellectual property, and to achieve this, ACTA creates new international legal rules for the regulation of intellectual property rights. From the information gleaned so far from releases, these include:

• Further criminalising non-commercial copyright and trademark infringements (this is the so-called “Pirate Bay Killer” clause);
• Reinforcing so-called “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) technologies that currently prevent the personal, legal reproduction of optical discs like DVDs and trample on “fair use” rights;
• Facilitatating privacy violations by trademark and copyright holders against private citizens suspected of infringement activities without any sort of legal due process;
• Expanding to an unprecedented extent customs and law enforcement officials’ abilities to police goods and information, including border measure in which customs and border agencies would become “copyright cops” authorized by to search, for example, personal music collections to look for evidence of P2P file-sharing or burned CDs and DVDs;
• Agreeing a privacy-destroying information exchange between governments between their citizens in order to protect  IPR industries (although the data exchange won’t be limited to that goal).  According to the USTR, this includes “sharing of information and cooperation between law enforcement authorities, including customs and other relevant agencies”;
• Restricting Peer-2-Peer (P2P) file-sharing, creating liability for search engines and other online service providers (effectively illegalising search);
• Requiring that ISPs police and control Internet content (as with the apparently discarded “3 strikes” legislation)
• Obligating states, law enforcement officials, and private firms to intrude on the privacy of “alleged” infringers without sufficient legal due process — and without the necessary permission of relevant copyright owners.

As Aaron Shaw points out in Knowledge Ecology Studies,

All of these provisions threaten to reach far beyond existing U.S. and E.U. legal norms without any mandate from the appropriate, elected legislative bodies that govern them. [7] As such, the trade officials involved in ACTA negotiations demonstrate a surprising disregard for their own countries’ democratic political processes and public welfare. They also threaten to overturn the existing balance of rights and regulations established through global governance institutions.

All of this has necessarily been gleaned from a very few leaks and articles, because despite its massive importance, ACTA discussions have been conducted in the dark corners of international policy making. With the exception of a handful of press releases, information about the proposal itself remains scarce. Mainstream media outlets have merely printed USTR officials’ talking points about the importance of winning “the  fight against fakes,” but have failed to analyze either the origins or  the nature of the ACTA in any detail.

This is utterly unacceptable. In the form that it currently appears to exist, ACTA would ratchet-up further the rights of Hollywood and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) at the expense of all of our civil liberties. It provisions to criminalize information use practices currently allowed under U.S., European, and international law are completely disproportionate to the ‘problems’ it claims to adress.  ‘If signed,’ Shaw continues succinctly,

the agreement would constitute a diplomatic putsch by a handful of wealthy states and corporations against the rest of the world. Already, it signals an overt and troubling rejection of multilateralism. The so-called “plurilateral” approach represents an outdated model of international treaty-making whereby the unelected representatives of Northern states and a few corporate lobbyists dictate the rules of global markets. Such arrangements were commonplace during the 1990s under the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus” and prior to the Doha Round of negotiations in the WTO. Today, however, this kind of blatant disregard for global consensus and the needs of developing regions poses a threat to the world’s prosperity, security and health. ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.

There is no doubt that ACTA cannot succeed at its purpose. Already we see projects like Cubit appearing, which, because it performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators. But merely makes ACTA the more disproportionate. ACTA criminalises the vast majority of people in one fell swoop, providing a case for unwarranted surveillance, search and seizure and unfair imprisonment. It invites a breeding ground for further abuse and erosion of citizens’ privacy and an unprecedented expansion of the State’s abilities to police goods and information.  In short, ACTA must be stopped.

Further Reading:

 The Problem with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (and what to do about it)
ACTA’s Misguided Effort to Increase Govt Spying and Ratchet-Up IPR Enforcement at Public Expense
Act Against Acta (IP Justice)