We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA
If there's one thing that encapsulates what's wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it. You wouldn't know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden …
Context & Ripple Effects
The EFF's broadside lands at the moment the opposition campaign against ACTA has reignited, with Michael Geist laying out what is at stake for signatory countries the same day. The treaty has been controversial since its previously-secret draft surfaced in 2010, revealing provisions that would push internet providers into policing copyright and blocking access to suspected piracy sites.
What makes this round different is breadth: the story is running simultaneously across the BBC, Washington Post, Guardian, Forbes, Mashable and others, turning a specialist trade-negotiation dispute into a mainstream one. Critics also point to the leaked US proposals for a 'Son of ACTA' within the TPP talks as evidence the negotiating template is already replicating itself.
First-order effects
- Signatory governments face a surge of public pressure just as ratification decisions approach, forcing the treaty into legislative debate rather than quiet executive approval.
- Internet providers are the named operational target: the draft text would deputize them as copyright enforcers responsible for policing subscriber behavior and site access.
Second-order effects
- Negotiators' reliance on closed-door plurilateral processes is now itself the controversy, raising the political cost of the same approach in parallel tracks like the TPP.
- Intermediary liability becomes a live lobbying battleground, with ISPs and rights holders both positioned to shape how any enforcement obligations get written into national law.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, copyright enforcement migrates from visible domestic lawmaking into trade agreements negotiated with limited transparency, letting substantive internet-policy decisions bypass ordinary legislative scrutiny.
- The backlash is building a durable cross-border activist coalition around treaty transparency, one that treats leaked texts rather than official summaries as the basis for public debate.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is shifting from national legislation toward plurilateral trade agreements negotiated behind closed doors, with public opposition mounting each time the texts surface.