They Were Wrong About ACTA

Michael Hedges February 20, 2012 - Follow on Twitter

Street protests in several cities over recent days generated more than headlines anti-piracy advocates never expected. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a multi-lateral treaty to protect “copyright protected works” through a new global enforcement mechanism, is just short of ratification. Activists mounted a campaign to derail, at most, or disrupt, at least and it may have succeeded.

From Eastern to Western Europe and beyond politicians started falling all over themselves to take cover. If ratified ACTA will form a new and powerful world-wide body to track down and punish suspected copyright infringement. It was drafted, mostly, in secret with help, as we learned from Wikileaks three years ago, from the motion picture and music industries. First signing up for ACTA in October last year were the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. At the end of January the European Union and 22 of its Member States signed on. Ratification would, then, come when Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia took pen to the dotted line, barring unforeseen difficulties with the individual parliaments, which had, mostly, signed off on the treaty. To come into force in the European Union (EU) the European Parliament will need to ratify.

As it happens in the post-modern age, reality hit the internet…eventually. Ratification of ACTA would “create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties,” wrote Harvard University research fellow Aaron Shaw in the academic journal Knowledge Ecology Studies (February 2008, and “would also facilitate privacy violations by trademark and copyright holders against private citizens suspected of infringement activities without any sort of legal due process.”

“I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness,” wrote Slovenia’s Ambassador to Japan Helena Drnovsek Zorko, quoted by Metina Lista (January 31), “because I did not pay enough attention. Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.”

The ACTA backtracking, fueled in part by the popular protests and in greater measure by political headwinds, shows little sign of ending. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk reversed course after the government representative originally signed on in January. “I was wrong,” he said, quoted by Warsaw Business Journal (February 17). “It would be a sin to maintain a mistaken belief. The agreement does not correspond to the reality of the 21st century. The battle for the right to property should also respect the right to freedom.” PM Tusk doesn’t like “the shape that was negotiated by the European Commission” and asked the European Parliament to reject the ACTA treaty. French MEP Kader Arif resigned as the European Parliament’s rapporteur (debate manager) (January 26) to “send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation.”

“I am taking the blame,” said Bulgaria’s Economy Minister Traicho Traikov, quoted by Sofia Echo (February 17). “I am pessimistic on regulation that attempts, through sanctions rather than market methods, to protect an industry that has failed to adapt to the digital age. Never should copyrights be put above human rights.” Slovenia’s Economic Development and Technology Minister Radovan Zerjav said his government will “freeze” ACTA ratification, reported news agency STA (February 17), joining governments of the Czech Republic, Latvia and Lithuania.

Some news sources, notably the AP (February 18), found the anti-ACTA movement something typically Eastern European, where “people remember being spied upon and controlled by oppressive communist regimes.” But governments of Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden have also put ACTA ratification in abeyance. The idea of being put on a list by authorities in secret wells up deeper fears.

“The present agreement on ACTA might have a detrimental effect on freedom of expression and a free flow of information in the digital age,” said media freedom representative for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Dunja Mijatovic (February 14) because it “would authorize online service providers to disclose personal information of alleged copyright infringers to rights holders without a court order or the right to appeal, placing the decision on the legal status of content outside the established judicial framework.”

Three decades after the Web’s birth legal frameworks for copyright are emerging slowly. Many rights holders continue view it as an enemy to be conquered and forced into subservience. That position was again dismissed as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against Belgian copyright manager SABAM (February 16) in its attempt to force a social media site (Netlog) to generally apply filters, thus preventing piracy. Oh, no, said the ECJ. Such filters “might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications.” The ECJ has consistently ruled against spying on internet users and, well, everybody else.

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