What is ACTA?

Since Spring 2007, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries have been secretly negotiating a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Specifically, leaked documents show that one of the major goal of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of strong criminal sanctions.

ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small "club" of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.

At a time when important debates are taking place on the need to adapt copyright to the digital age, this treaty would bypass democratic processes in order to enforce a fundamentally irrelevant regulatory regime. It would profoundly alter the very nature of the Internet as we know it by by putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a legal weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves.

Read the final analysis of the text that negotiating parties signed and why we need to defeat it together.

Extensive analysis on ACTA

• Knowledge Ecology International on ACTA
• Michael Geist on ACTA
• La Quadrature du Net"dossier on ACTA
• FFII Acta Blog
• WikiLeaks Cables Shine Light on ACTA History

  Essential readings

  • European ACTA Rapporteur resigns in protest of negotiating process
  • Final Version on ACTA. (HTML and PDF)
  • ACTA and Access to medicines study
  • OPINION on the compatibility of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) with the European Convention on Human Rights & the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights
  • Networked Governance-Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report
  • INTA Study Confirms ACTA Must Be Rejected
  • EFF essay: The impact of ACTA on the knowledge economy
  • Obama: We Must Move Forward On ACTA
  • MPAA letter to U.S Congress
  • European Parliament Resolution on ACTA

Quotes on ACTA

Privacy and data protection

Intellectual property must be protected, but it should not be placed above individuals' rights to privacy and data protection.

Peter Hustinx, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), issued a report on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), claiming that it could prove unworkable under current European Union data protection laws.

Democracy and transparency

ACTA is legislation laundering on an international level of what would be very difficult to get through most Parliaments

Stravros Lambrinidis, Member of European Parliament, S and D, Greece

The European Parliament has had no representation in ACTA negotiations. Just accepting or rejecting an agreement is not an exercise of democracy as under the Lisbon Treaty.

Zuzana Roithova, Member of European Parliament, EPP, Czech Republic

Freedom of expression

It is extremely regrettable that democratic debate has been eliminated from talks that could have a major impact on such a fundamental freedom as free expression.

Reporters without Borders, European Parliament Sakharov Prize Winners

Internet service providers liability

Any measures concerning people's right to go online need to be brought in through the proper democratic channels, not via self-regulation, and made into EU law

Andrea D?Incecco, public affairs manager from EuroISPA (Business association of European Internet Service Providers)

ACTA, by putting pressure on Internet service providers opens the door to private 'three strikes' approaches and generalized surveillance of the Net.

Françoise Castex, Member of European Parliament, S and D, France.

Third party liability for Internet Server Providers is like making the post office responsible for what is inside the letters they send.

Alexander Alvaro, Member of European Parliament, ALDE, Germany.

Access to medicine

We can only assume that the final text could do great harm in developing countries and undermine the balance between the protection of intellectual property and the need to provide affordable medicines for poor people.

Rohit Malpani, OXFAM, from a press release criticising possible impact of ACTA.

We are in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds, pushing IP rules, which are very effective at stopping access to life-saving drugs but are very bad at stopping or preventing fake drugs.

Michelle Childs of Médecins Sans Frontières, Nobel Peace Prize winners, has issued a very critical statement on ACTA.

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