Tech
|
1/23/2012 @ 11:10AM |48,266 views
If You Thought SOPA Was Bad, Just Wait Until You Meet ACTA
Daniel Nye Griffiths, ContributorThe price of liberty and all that… for English-language coverage, it's worth looking at Britain's Open Rights Group, who have been tracking it since the fi [...]
thomfrumadaSounds like this is one of those signed sealed and delivered things that average citizens will have no say or control over. The whole surveillance angle is [...]
Image by mermadon 1967 via Flickr
Updated below.
When sites like Wikipedia and Reddit banded together for a major blackout January 18th, the impact was felt all the way to Washington D.C. The blackout had lawmakers running from the controversial anti-piracy legislation, SOPA and PIPA, which critics said threatened freedom of speech online.
Unfortunately for free-speech advocates, censorship is still a serious threat.
Few people have heard of ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, but the provisions in the agreement are just as pernicious as anything we saw in SOPA. Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.
Many of these countries have already signed or ratified it, and the cogs are still turning. The treaty has been secretly negotiated behind the scenes, with unelected bureaucrats working closely with entertainment industry lobbyists to craft the provisions in the treaty. The Bush administration started the process, but the Obama administration has aggressively pursued it.
Indeed, we've already signed on to the treaty. All it needs now is Senate ratification. The time to stop the treaty is now, and we may need a second global internet blackout to call attention to it.
Here's a quick video primer:
ACTA bypasses the sovereign laws of participating nations, forcing ISP's across the globe to adopt these draconian measures.
Worse, it goes much further than the internet, cracking down on generic drugs and making food patents even more radical than they are by enforcing a global standard on seed patents that threatens local farmers and food independence across the developed world.
Despite ACTA's secrecy, criticism of the agreement has been widespread. Countries like India and Brazil have been vocal opponents of the agreement, claiming that it will do a great deal of harm to emerging economies.
I'll have more on the agreement as it emerges. But to briefly sum up, ACTA contains global IP provisions as restrictive or worse than anything contained in SOPA and PIPA.
- ACTA spans virtually all of the developed world, threatening the freedom of the internet as well as access to medication and food. The threat is every bit as real for those countries not involved in the process as the signatories themselves.
- ACTA has already been signed by many countries including the US, but requires ratification in the EU parliament and the US Senate.
- The entire monstrosity has been negotiated behind closed doors and kept secret from the public. Technocrats, beholden to the deep pockets of the entertainment lobby, have masked the agreement behind the misnomer of "anti-counterfeiting" when in fact it goes much, much further.
If you thought SOPA would break the internet, ACTA is much worse. And it could become law across the global economy without so much as a murmur of opposition.
Worse still, it's not alone. Even more restrictive provisions exist in another trade agreement currently being hammered out by various nations.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are "other plurilateral agreements, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), which contains a chapter on IP enforcement that would have state signatories adopt even more restrictive copyright measures than ACTA. Similarly, negotiations over TPP are also held in secret and with little oversight by the public or civil society. These initiatives, negotiated without participation from civil society or the public, are an affront to a democratic world order. EFF will remain vigilant against these international initiatives that threaten to choke off creativity, innovation, and free speech, and will stand with EDRi, FFII, La Quadrature du Net and our other EU fellow traveller organizations in their campaign to defeat ACTA in the European Parliament in January."
The global economy needs to be seen as separate from those nations which comprise the global community of states. Civil society and a free global economy are not the same thing as the bogeyman so often referred to simply as "globalism."
The free flow of goods and information is as much threatened by the global state apparatus as it is assisted by it, and industries with a vested interested in maintaining the status quo through draconian protectionist measures are now threatening the last frontier of the truly free economy.
By threatening the internet and free speech, the entertainment industry threatens its own existence. But with only short-term profits in mind, this will not deter them.
Yes, our lawmakers fled from SOPA and PIPA when push came to shove, but they have ACTA to fall back on. Notably, few of them are speaking out against this even more dangerous treaty. Not surprisingly one of the lone voices of dissent is Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) who has spoken out against the treaty.
"It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law," he wrote. "But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law … the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval."
Even absent US participation, however, we should all be worried about the implications of this and other trade agreements on the global economy, the ripple effects of which would reach all of us regardless of geographical location.
Remember, when one of these bills or trade agreements falls, another rises up to take its place. ACTA has been in the works for several years. SOPA almost passed into law unopposed. The threat to civil society isn't going away.
If you care about freedom of speech, or if you have participated in SOPA protests, please help spread the word about ACTA. You can sign a petition to stop it here.
Update: I have read conflicting things about this agreement. Part of the problem is the lack of transparency and information available. It appears to be defined as a sole executive agreement, meaning the president's signature on this is all it takes for it to become law, though Sen. Ron Wyden has questioned the constitutionality of that. If this is the case, I can't see anything actually standing in its way other than the risk of a court challenge if any of the measures are actually implemented.
Cory Doctorow describes the agreement as "a secretly negotiated copyright treaty that obliges its signatories to take on many of the worst features of SOPA and PIPA. The EU is nearing ratification of it. ACTA was instigated by US trade reps under the Bush Administration, who devised and enforced its unique secrecy regime, but the Obama administration enthusiastically pursued it."
From the EFF update on developments in ACTA in 2011:
While Internet blacklist bills exploded into the domestic U.S. Congressional scene this year, foreboding international forces are also posing new threats to the Internet around the world. The most prominent of these is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), signed by the U.S. in 2011, which would strengthen intellectual property enforcement norms between signatory countries, handing overbroad powers to the content industry to preserve their antiquated business model. ACTA was widely criticized for being negotiated in secret, bypassing national parliaments and the checks and balances in existing international organizations. One of the most disheartening features of this plurilateral agreement [1] is that it creates a new global IP enforcement institution to oversee its implementation.
Eight[2] of the 11 ACTA participating countries have signed the agreement and the battle now mainly lies in the European Union. This week, the Council of the European Union—one of the European Union's two legislative bodies, composed of executives from the 27 EU member states—adopted ACTA during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries. It is now up to the European Parliament, the EU's other legislative body, to give consent on ACTA in the coming year. The European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee has discussed the agreement on December 20th, and released its very guarded opinion, summarily stating: "It appears that the agreement per se does not impose any obligation on the Union that is manifestly incompatible with fundamental rights." This opinion is not surprising, given how the Committee newsletter [doc] published a few days prior spoke highly of ACTA, hinting strongly that it is supportive of its signature.
But to be quite honest, the fog surrounding all of this is pretty thick still. I'll try to shine more light on it in future posts.
For more information please visit:
EFF's International Issue Page on ACTA: https://www.eff.org/issues/acta
European Digital Rights' (EDRi) coverage here: www.edri.org/stopacta
La Quadrature du Net's coverage here: http://www.laquadrature.net/en/acta
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure's (FFII) blog on ACTA http://acta.ffii.org/
Twitter hash tags: #ACTA
Twitter accounts:
~
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook or Google+. Read my Forbes blog here.
Daniel Nye Griffiths, ContributorThe price of liberty and all that… for English-language coverage, it's worth looking at Britain's Open Rights Group, who have been tracking it since the fi [...]thomfrumadaSounds like this is one of those signed sealed and delivered things that average citizens will have no say or control over. The whole surveillance angle is [...]More on Forbes Right Now
Today's Top Stories
- Cities Where Real Estate Is Ripe For A Rebound+9,298 views
- Ten Ways To Pay For College Right Now+3,800 views
- Highest-Earning American Idols+3,226 views
Original Page: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/23/if-you-thought-sopa-was-bad-just-wait-until-you-meet-acta/
Sent from my iPad
Post Your Comment
Don't have an account?
Join Forbes Now.
Comments
OMG
The price of liberty and all that… for English-language coverage, it's worth looking at Britain's Open Rights Group, who have been tracking it since the first published draft in 2010. It ties in with various awkward bits of our own Digital Economy Act. Good to see it getting some attention in the aftermath of SOPA!
ACTA is an "executive agreement", and does not require Senate ratification. The US became a party to the agreement as soon as it was signed.
Howeer, ACTA could have been far, far worse, had it not been for all the leaks. For example, ISPS, in the original version, would have been required to deploy deep-packet-inspection.
The anti-circumvention clauses of the orgiinal ACTA, before they were dropped, would have been far worse then SOPA. SOPA would only criminalise the providers of services, and not the users. The original ACTA draft would have required that users be criminalised as well.
Even businesses that used VPN for remote access to their networks would have faced licensing requirements like those in Oman and Iran.
Sounds like this is one of those signed sealed and delivered things that average citizens will have no say or control over. The whole surveillance angle is… not right. Plenty of that going around, it seems. That said, I do hope someone somewhere is keeping track of the people who are driving this initiative. Names, addresses, places of business, etc.