The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a multilateral enforcement treaty for the purpose of establishing an international standard regulation for counterfeit goods specially generic medicines and intellectual properties on the Internet. Initially developed secretly on 2006 by United States and the depositary Japan, has then been leaked on 2008 when Wikileaks uploaded a discussion paper on his website.
Since then 31 countries had signed the treaty: US, Canada, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan and Morocco on October 1 and, on last January, the European Union and 22 member countries. After waves of protest some European governments, including the non signatories Germany and Netherlands, stopped the ratification process.
Composed by 45 articles ACTA doesn't change anything on intellectual property but enforces the TRIPS, the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, encouraging the parties to develop and improve their competent authorities, promoting an international cooperation on information sharing and establishing (art. 36) the ACTA Commitee as an autonomous international organism empowered to propose amendments to the treaty even after its adoption.
Section 5 is the most controversial part of the agreement. Article 27, about Enforcement in the Digital Environment, encourage the Parties, "in accordance with its laws and regulations", "to order an online service provider to disclose expeditiously to a right holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement" where (quoting Wikipedia), an "online service provider can for example be an internet service provider, email provider, news provider (press), entertainment provider (music, movies), search, e-shopping site (online stores), e-finance or e-banking site, e-health site, e-government site, Wikipedia, Usenet." All this services, according to ACTA, must be then in charge of collecting private informations turning the web in a Cyber Police State.
Why should we care about ACTA is a good question. Anyone has his own motivation, someone says all the process has been anti-democratic since the beginning, someone else is worried about the future of privacy and others could says after all the wrong here is the idea to close ideas into a private space.
Internet is maybe the last most important innovation in our society, why are we gonna re-think it in the usual boring way?
If you wanna keep update of ACTA road map jump to European Digital Rights website here.
Composed by 45 articles ACTA doesn't change anything on intellectual property but enforces the TRIPS, the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, encouraging the parties to develop and improve their competent authorities, promoting an international cooperation on information sharing and establishing (art. 36) the ACTA Commitee as an autonomous international organism empowered to propose amendments to the treaty even after its adoption.
Section 5 is the most controversial part of the agreement. Article 27, about Enforcement in the Digital Environment, encourage the Parties, "in accordance with its laws and regulations", "to order an online service provider to disclose expeditiously to a right holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement" where (quoting Wikipedia), an "online service provider can for example be an internet service provider, email provider, news provider (press), entertainment provider (music, movies), search, e-shopping site (online stores), e-finance or e-banking site, e-health site, e-government site, Wikipedia, Usenet." All this services, according to ACTA, must be then in charge of collecting private informations turning the web in a Cyber Police State.
Why should we care about ACTA is a good question. Anyone has his own motivation, someone says all the process has been anti-democratic since the beginning, someone else is worried about the future of privacy and others could says after all the wrong here is the idea to close ideas into a private space.
Internet is maybe the last most important innovation in our society, why are we gonna re-think it in the usual boring way?
If you wanna keep update of ACTA road map jump to European Digital Rights website here.
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