The Wonderful World of ACTA

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an attempt by western governments driven by industry to impose standard restrictive damages around the world for IP and content infringement. The antagonists all sing the same songs about dangerous counterfeit drugs and damage to branding ecosystems. The detractors have no reply to these claims because who could possibly not want to save lives? Which is the same tack as the 'Counterfeiting' name suggests. No sane person would be against counterfeiting would they?

And perhaps the intentions here are wholesome and good. Maybe the people who started ACTA are really interested in doing the right thing by business and saving lives. The unfortunate problem at the moment is that the key groups driving this agreement are commercial interests. Content producers are absolutely panicked about the internet and rampant theft and will do anything to stop it.

Movie previews now have security pat down checks and mandatory coat / bag / phone checking. Cinema staff are paid bounties to use their night vision goggles to catch people creating dodgy film re-productions using handy cams. The content industry is not just panicking, they're scared whit less. Fear makes both people and corporations do really stupid things like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on night vision goggles and forcibly degrading your customers dignity by man-handling them before allowing entry to a cinema.

Drafts of proposed ACTA agreements have been posted all around the place. Unfortunately I've only seen summaries and comments, but the draft content doesn't sound good. There are a slew of mistakes being made on behalf of the content industry. These include externalization of IP enforcement costs, extreme border searches, removal of safe harbour provisions for ISP's and the resulting termination of internet connectivity for users.

This is scary stuff and the time has finally arrived when the governments and corporations of the world are squaring their shoulders and facing off with the internet. Because no person wants these provisions, only corporations and governments. And this is really the horrendous part of the whole scenario. Laws are being grandfathered into nations by way of secret negotiations and not being written by the elected representatives. These secret trade negotiations are the worst sort of failure of representative government we've seen in 500 years.

The division between normal society and on-line community is growing. Those whom serve the forces of restriction, demand and penalization and those who encourage the exercising of responsibility, information sharing and morality.