IT SOUNDS much like any other yawn-inducing cross-border treaty. But the nascent Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that's on the table at this week's G8 meeting in Japan may have far-reaching consequences. If it becomes international law, anyone who offers copyrighted files over the internet or downloads them may be labelled a criminal and forcibly disconnected from the net.
ACTA aims to make it easier to penalise and prosecute people running websites or networks that aid and abet the sharing of copyrighted content, including music, movies, TV shows and books. While copyright infringement is already illegal, policing it across multiple borders has been difficult, especially as fleet-of-foot file-sharers can shift their operations from one jurisdiction to another at the click of a mouse. By enshrining ACTA principles in national laws, the G8 hopes to make flight pointless.
The proposed treaty has progressed with remarkable speed by the standards of international law. Quietly proposed by the Bush administration in September 2007, it quickly gathered support from the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and Mexico.
The alacrity with which ACTA is being introduced, and the lack of public debate, has alarmed watchdogs. "Given the speed with which this treaty is being negotiated, and its potentially significant impact, the lack of transparency in the negotiation process and failure to provide citizens with an opportunity for informed consultation is extremely concerning," says a statement from California-based pressure group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
So swift and secretive have deliberations been that ACTA might easily have slipped under the radar altogether had it not been for a discussion paper that leaked from a source close to the Canadian government this May. ACTA is ostensibly designed to create a global coalition against the counterfeiting of goods - ranging from medicines to aircraft spares and designer underpants - all currently covered by a confusing array of international laws.
The treaty also assumes that copying digital content amounts to counterfeiting and proposes cross-border powers to combat it. The leaked paper reveals that ACTA-based laws would make it a criminal offence to provide services that help people breach copyright.
The treaty proposes rigorous cross-border digital policing
This is important because under current legislation it is not always clear when someone has broken the law, says Marc Temin, a lawyer based in Boston, Massachusetts, who specialises in intellectual property law. "When somebody makes a copyrighted file available to the public, it's not clear whether that constitutes a direct infringement, as actually copying and sending the copy to somebody would do."
This is where ACTA comes in. ACTA would make it illegal not just to share copyrighted material, but to operate websites that index the locations of such material that people can download. It would also outlaw systems like BitTorrent or Gnutella that help users find files on "peer-to-peer" (P2P) networks of computers.
"ACTA is a Pirate Bay killer," says the team behind the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, referring to the Swedish website that claims to be the world's largest BitTorrent site. Pirate Bay has so far defied prosecution under Swedish law, but ACTA could open the door to legal claims similar to the US actions that shut down TorrentSpy, another popular BitTorrent site, in May.
Wikileaks, which first hosted the leaked ACTA discussion paper, itself has a stake in the outcome: its stance that it publishes sensitive, often copyrighted documents in the public interest may not be tenable if ACTA becomes law. When Wikileaks' US-hosted site was closed by a court earlier this year, its Belgian and Australian sites stayed online. But ACTA's international scope could allow disgruntled companies or governments to shut down its mirror sites around the world.
Others are also worried about ACTA's consequences. The Free Software Foundation believes ACTA will induce internet service providers (ISPs) to block P2P file-sharing communications - killing off the legitimate applications of such systems. "Without file-sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent, distributing large amounts of free software will become much harder, and more expensive," the foundation says.
ACTA will also apply "border measures" that allow "copyright infringing shipments" to be detected - prompting speculation that everything from USB drives to iPods and laptops will become searchable at border crossings. And ISPs would be subject to a legal regime that safeguards them from liability for copyright infringement as long as they "co-operate with rights holders in the removal of infringing material".
This last provision will raise hackles at some ISPs, many of whom have previously argued that they shouldn't be responsible for the content carried by their networks. That makes sound business sense: they don't want to alienate customers who don't like the idea of their activity being policed, or lose customers who fall foul of rules on downloading. But they're coming under pressure to change their stance from governments that view copyright enforcement as critical for protecting creative industries - and would like ISPs to act as "copyright cops".
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Have your say
As we see our freedoms being eroded around the world faster than species are going extinct, one last hope for universal world wide freedom is snuffed out. "They" are trying to kill the Internet. This really has nothing to do with stopping people from sharing music and video files that may be covered under a copyright. It has everything to do with control of our use of the Internet and giving governments the broad powers to do it. For many years since the internet was created, governments around the world have been scared and have tried to impose rules and restrictions on our use of it, often with little success. Now it seems that they have found a way to control the internet and that is why it has been quickly agreed and cloaked in secrecy. But on a technical note, how can anyone tell the difference between a file I create and own the copyright to and that I want to share with people and a file that someone else created if the files are encrypted? Simply put, the internet users will find a away round this as they have every other attempt to control them. However, the short term consequences, as indicated in your article, are dire for freedoms around the world, as you correctly point out, everything created by a government or a company will be protected by copyright so leaking evidence of wrong doing and sharing it on the Internet will become illegal as will the sites and services that enable the sharing, just what despotic governments and shady and greedy companies want â no wonder they are so keen to make it international law. Fortunately the main users of this file sharing are apparently 14 to 24 year olds and eventually they will become voters, politicians, law makers and company directors, so they will simply undo what our short-sighted generation attempts to do in controlling the use of the Internet.
<i>Fortunately the main users of this file sharing are apparently 14 to 24 year olds and eventually they will become voters, politicians, law makers and company directors, so they will simply undo what our short-sighted generation attempts to do in controlling the use of the Internet.</i>
I sincerely doubt that. The free-spirits of the '60s, who would have been opposed to such overwhelming government and industrial control, are now the ones in power making these decisions. And the children of the '80s who made mix tapes left and right are now the ones approving of these rigid controls.
The music industry is essentially run as a cartel with the big four charging what they want. The cost of music production is incredibly low and they could easily provide music at a much lower cost to the end user than they currently do. This is has become even more true that the unit cost of replication has fallen to almost zero via digital downloads. The music industry is also prone to a lack of substitute goods as no artistâs music is a direct replacement for any other artist. Just because artists have made millions in the past does not make it their right to earn millions now. Itâs time the music industry listened and substantially reduced their prices.
I agree with Chris. If it was cheaper to legally buy music I for one would be more than happy to buy cd's or downloads. I still do buy music from bands that I like because I don't think you will ever get away from wanting a tangible album to hold and look at but, charging £12 or £15 for a CD these days is crazy. No wonder people just download them for free. The industry really needs to wake up to the fact that people WOULD buy the albums and singles if they were priced correctly, but until something dramatically changes the lure of having it for free will be too strong.
Download and listen to an album for free and if you like it buy it. Simple no? Do the kids with thousands and thousands of tracks in their iTunes library actually listen to half of it? I think it is just more of a numbers game to see who has the biggest collection.
I'd love to read some research into how many times most of the downloaded tracks are actually played. I would put money on half of them never even being clicked on.
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