The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is at Stake and What You Can Do
The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. (excellent analysis from Benkler and Downes) and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules) …
Context & Ripple Effects
ACTA has been the quieter twin of the SOPA fight all along: back in March 2010, coverage of the draft treaty's provisions for cutting off internet access of copyright scofflaws flagged exactly the enforcement-by-disconnection ideas that later made SOPA toxic. After the January 2012 protest wave — including Scribd's decision to make a billion web pages disappear in solidarity — Geist argues the energy is rotating from the defeated U.S. bill to the still-pending treaty, with EFF making the parallel case the same day that public fury at ACTA is justified.
The pickup list shows how far this travelled beyond the policy blogs: EFF, the Guardian, Mashable, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb, Boing Boing and others all ran versions within a day, treating ACTA not as a niche trade story but as SOPA's sequel. The open question Geist raises is whether Canada's Bill C-11 gets amended to absorb SOPA-like rules — an unconfirmed concern circulating among Canadian observers rather than a settled plan.
First-order effects
- Public opposition to ACTA re-ignites across signatory countries just as the treaty heads toward ratification decisions, forcing governments that signed quietly to defend it publicly.
- Canadian lawmakers weighing amendments to Bill C-11 come under pressure from activists who, emboldened by SOPA's collapse, are watching for SOPA-like language — though the claim that such amendments are coming remains unconfirmed.
Second-order effects
- Rights-holder groups that lost the SOPA battle gain a second procedural route through ACTA, since treaty commitments can lock in enforcement rules with less granular domestic debate than a standalone bill.
- The SOPA protest coalition — sites like Scribd alongside advocacy groups — has a ready-made template to redeploy against ACTA, raising the political cost for any parliament that ratifies without amendment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major copyright enforcement terms migrate from visible national legislation into trade agreements negotiated with limited public input — a bottleneck migration that shifts the real drafting power to trade ministries and away from elected legislatures.
The trend: Copyright enforcement politics is migrating from defeated domestic bills like SOPA toward international trade treaties such as ACTA, where the same rules can be adopted with thinner public scrutiny.