Neither you nor I are counterfeiters, so why should we care?
Hidden in this secretly-negotiated treaty are several things that will affect us all. I will try to explain these in terms that are as non-technical as possible.
ACTA has nothing to do with counterfeit money. It is about policing copyright. It will do this in ways that infringe civil liberties, privacy and free speech plus create a surveillance organization answerable to no-one.
ACTA will empower border guards to take your laptop, phone or iPod and search these for pirated music. How are you going to prove that you own every tune? They can hold these for months, and give your data to other agencies to analyse. There will be no presumption of innocence, no right of appeal, and no due process.
These excessive powers will be wielded by a proposed governing body outside of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. In other words, the entertainment industry will have its own international police force.
Further, ACTA will introduce filtering of internet content by service providers, who will be obliged to cut off your internet access if you are accused (not convicted, just accused) of violating copyright three times. Techniques such as “deep packet inspection” will violate your privacy.
ACTA seeks to more strongly enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM), including the possibility of eliminating region-free DVDs. (I’ll write more about the multitude of problems DRM causes, and link to it from here.)
In addition, ACTA seeks to limit peer-to-peer networking (P2P). I can’t help but wonder what that will do to internet telephony - Skype runs on P2P. There are well over 100 million users of Skype, which runs on P2P. P2P has many current and emerging applications for business and society. It seems that those who have drafted ACTA, and any who sign it, have no understanding of how the internet works.
The terms of ACTA, which emanates from the USA, will be set by the initial countries that sign it. Subsequent signatories will have no say in these terms, and in most cases will have little power to resist. So the time to stop these excesses is now.
The only reason the general public knows about ACTA is that someone provided the secret discussion document to Wikileaks, and some online news publications picked it up. I think it is also relevant that we talk to our governments about the need for transparency. This was all being done behind closed doors.
In my country, Australia, which is party to the ACTA discussions, there are several respected organizations that have expressed their concern. These are the Australian Digital Alliance, the Australian Library and Information Association, CHOICE, and the Internet Industry Association. In my opinion it is urgent that we everyday citizens let the government know that we know, and that we don’t want this treaty and its accompanying private police state. Or the negotiations behind closed doors.
