On Jan. 27th, 2012, Chloe Albanesius wrote for PCMag.com on the newest anti-piracy legislation: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. ACTA is an international agreement that is "designed to extend existing intellectual property enforcement laws to the Internet." It's somewhat unclear what powers ACTA would give to a signatory. The article mentions that signatory countries can "force [copyright] infringers to hand over profits gained from pirated works to the rightsholders." In many respects, ACTA sounds like the shelved SOPA/PIPA legislation.
ACTA is not necessarily new: it was proposed in 2007, and the US lead several other countries (including Japan, Australia, Korea, and Canada) in signing the agreement. Interestingly, the article notes that President Obama signed ACTA as an executive agreement, not a treaty. As such, the Senate never had to ratify ACTA.
So what's the big deal? Many of the same concerns that drove the SOPA/PIPA protests–preserving the internet's freedom, doubts about enforceability, and the fear of turning ISPs into content police–are applicable to ACTA.
You can find the PCMag.com article here.
***
In fact, in an article for Forbes written by E.D. Kain, US Rep. Darrell Issa (the leading opponent of SOPA) was quoted as saying that ACTA is "more dangerous than SOPA." Rep. Issa went on to say that ACTA "creates a whole new enforcement system and will virtually tie the hands of Congress to undo it."
***
BBC reported that Polish protesters rioted after Poland's government signed ACTA.
***
The Washington Post reported that 22 EU member states signed ACTA on Thursday.
***
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a nice write up about ACTA and gets into the questionable constitutionality of President Obama's executive agreement.
***
CNet reported that the hacker group Anonymous attacked several EU websites in retribution for signing ACTA.
Leave a Reply