The veil of secrecy over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is slowly beginning to lift. Starting with a leak late last year over proposed restrictions on digital interoperability (ostensibly making it more difficult for devices/programs to work together without “permission” from the device/program creators), more has come to light since then.
Questions of transparency – not just of ACTA, but of the entire negotiating process itself – are now being asked more pointedly. Especially now that ACTA’s “Internet Chapter” has leaked; in a nutshell, it would impose the U.S.’ draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to all ACTA signatories.
The most egregious provisions are the potential of mandatory traffic-filtering, the potential of a “three strikes” provision (i.e., get caught sharing copyrighted information three times and your Internet access is revoked), and the “encouragement” that any Internet service provider (ISP) informed that it may be involved (even by proxy) of the exchange of “prohibited” information be required to operate with authorities to stop the “problem.”
Fortunately, the more the bits of ACTA come to light, the more opposition it finds. No surprise that most of the document’s incremental leaks have come from Europe, where more than a thousand ISPs have already gone on record opposing what little they already know of the proposed treaty. More than 40 countries are involved in ACTA negotiations; so far, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, and South Korea have already expressed reservations with the treaty, either in public or during the negotiations themselves.
Although in January it was reported that ACTA-style provisions are already being implemented at U.S. customs-entry points, perhaps those provisions will end at our borders. In other contexts, global trade is not quite as fashionable (at least under the hyper-capitalist model we espouse here) as was, say, 15 years ago.
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