Since late 2007 representatives of governments from the United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Canada, among others, have been negotiating a treaty known as ACTA. The negotiations—the seventh round is scheduled for Mexico in January—are held in strict secrecy, and ACTA memos are physically watermarked to prevent leaks. Some Freedom of Information Act requests regarding ACTA—including one in January by the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)—have been flat-out denied, and similar requests have produced papers so heavily redacted that blacked-out text runs almost edge to edge. The U.S. government has routinely invoked national security to explain its lack of transparency on the matter, but ACTA doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear stockpiles or espionage or the war on terror—it’s just a trade agreement. Of course, to judge by EU documents leaked last month, it’s a trade agreement with the potential to transform global intellectual property law, effectively remove due process from the prosecution of online copyright infringement, and turn Internet service providers into spies for the entertainment industry—but still.
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ACTA stands for Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement, and its advocates emphasize the treaty’s broad application across multiple industries—no doubt because it’s hard to find anybody who’ll protest a crackdown on knockoff car parts, pharmaceuticals, or Louis Vuitton bags. But people who don’t like the sketchy picture of ACTA that’s emerged as documents have leaked see that as a smoke screen to distract the public from the serious ugliness of the treaty’s Internet chapter. That’s where it becomes clearest that ACTA is in part a way for the entertainment industry to shape international law to suit its desires, often at the expense of individual rights.
“This is absolutely a rightsholder-driven agreement,” writes Danny O’Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group of activists and lawyers who fight what they see as attempts by government and business to curtail the freedom to exchange data. “Increasing powers for enforcement and widening traditional commercial piracy strategies to cope with Internet file sharing is a very traditional technique to take, and from what we know of ACTA, that’s what is being proposed by all sides.”
The thing is, even if ACTA were passed with the RIAA’s wish list entirely intact, file sharing would most likely continue unabated. Geist writes that ACTA would have “very little impact,” and O’Brien goes further: “Even the most specific proposal we’ve heard mooted—the widening adoption of France’s ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy of terminating ‘Net users after three accusations from rightsholders—would just shift what technology people use to give their friends copies of their favourite media.”
