From Keep the Web Open:
On March 7, 2012, the top Obama Administration trade official – US Trade Representative Ron Kirk – testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the disturbing, Internet-threatening work USTR is doing with the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Get the full hearing documents and testimony here.
You can read more about ACTA and TPP here and on Ars Technica.
I’ve written before about many European countries taking a stand against ACTA. Today, four more countries join in opposition of passing the controversial trade agreement. Austria, Bulgaria, and The Netherlands have stood up and agreed that ACTA needs to be seriously rethought and possibly scrapped altogether.
Two million people are already supporting an online petition against the international anti-piracy agreement. It would undermine the privacy, Internet service providers should provide the authorities of private data from users. “People are confused,” Interior Minister recognizes Johanna Mikl-Leitner (VP), the sign of the times and today announced over a veto on the ratification of the Council of Ministers on ACTA.
Now the European Parliament on the train. On 12 June in Brussels on ACTA entschieden.Auch the local Social Democratic Party faction opposes ACTA. If the contract in the EU do not find a majority, he would have to be confirmed in this country in the National Council. “The freedom of the Internet is for us young ones a very valuable asset,” says VP-Secretary Sebastian Kurz.Auch he wants ACTA shelve.
Bulgaria, who also originally signed ACTA, have said they are freezing the ratification of the agreement after numerous protests against it.
Bulgaria will not ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement over fears it will curb freedom to download movies and music for free and encourage internet surveillance, economy minister Traicho Traikov said on Tuesday.
Bulgaria’s Economy and Energy Minister Traicho Traikov says Sofia will not ratify the agreement until the EU member states elaborate a joint position on the document.
So, Bulgaria, like Germany, awaiting the decision of the EU Parliament, but they appear firmly on the side of abandoning ACTA. The Netherlands also haven’t signed the treaty and it looks like they aren’t planning on it any time soon.
They only intend to change this position if there’s irrefutable evidence that it doesn’t violate basic human rights.
Right now this is certainly not the case, as professors Douwe Korff and Ian Brown examined ACTA’s compatibility with human rights and concluded:
“Overall, ACTA tilts the balance of IPR protection manifestly unfairly towards one group of beneficiaries of the right to property, IP right holders, and unfairly against others.”
“It equally disproportionately interferes with a range of other fundamental rights, and provides or allows for the determination of such rights in procedures that fail to allow for the taking into account of the different, competing interests, but rather, stack all the weight at one end. “
“This makes the entire Agreement, in our opinion, incompatible with fundamental European human rights instruments and -standards.”
Again, The Netherlands is looking into it and, if it doesn’t violate basic human rights, the would sign it.
The European Commission is even advising that a partial retreat be taken on ACTA.
The minutes of the meeting, Which have been Obtained by EDRI, say that the head of cabinet Described the “strong mobilization” against the agreement by “Certain NGOs and movements active on the Internet” and stated that a referral of the Agreement to the Court of Justice is being considered. It is noteworthy that the only suggestion is to check the compatibility of ACTA with primary EU law. Such a referral, Depending on how it is framed, risks being quite vague and may not lead to a comprehensive response. However, any broadly Favourable response from the Court would most certainly be used to push through the agreement, on the basis that the ruling “Proves” that there is no problem.
The head of cabinet added that it is Necessary to instigate a period of reflection on how the EU should position itself on this issue and to make an effort to go beyond the argument that growth in the digital economy is only possible with adequate protection of intellectual property . The Secretary General of the Commission closed the discussion by saying the Commission would return to the dossier in due course, after a “period of reflection thorough.”
Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission and EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, is also backing a review of ACTA before it proceeds any further.
she states “for me, blocking the Internet is never an option” and goes onto argue the current situation “can and must not be changed by the ACTA agreement”.
“I therefore welcome the intention of several members of the European Parliament to ask the European Court of Justice for a legal opinion to clarify that the ACTA agreement cannot limit freedom of expression and freedom of the Internet.”
If these lawmakers had not taken it upon themselves to vote for such agreements in secret, actually read the documents they were voting on, and considered the people they are supposed to represent, we would be having riots and demonstrations and ACTA would either never have been signed or a different version would have emerged. Now, there is a mess that needs to be cleaned up and those who were supposed to uphold the law are scrambling to figure out what they should do.
Mitchell Baker, the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has come out strongly against ACTA as well.
One aspect of the controversy about ACTA is the closed process where only a tiny subset of people affected by the law were allowed to participate. Another great controversy is about the actual content of ACTA. We know that the goal of stopping unauthorized access to digital content can lead to very dangerous results. The proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation in the U.S made this abundantly clear. This is an area where even good intentions can lead to imbalanced and dangerous results.
More people are learning about ACTA. If they can put the pressure on like they did with SOPA/PIPA, there’s a very real chance that ACTA will never be ratified or enacted. The pressure just needs to be applied continually until June when the EU Parliament decide the matter.
Photo from Heute.at.
Many countries that have signed ACTA are now rethinking their positions and apologizing for screwing up their countries with such legislation. Once everyone actually took the time to read and research what ACTA does, they discovered that they aren’t happy with what it entails at all.
One of the biggest regrets came from Poland this week when it suspended its ratification process for ACTA. Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, said that there were insufficient consultations made before signing it.
Tusk’s backtracking could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union. If Poland or any other EU member state, or the European Parliament itself, fails to ratify the document, it becomes null and void across the union. As it stands, there are already five member countries that have not even signed ACTA.
Poland has seen the biggest protests against ACTA, with thousands demonstrating on the streets last week. Hackers believed to be associated with Anonymous attacked Tusk’s website, as well as the European Parliament site, after the signing.
Critics of ACTA say it has insufficient safeguards for online liberties, particularly in signing countries that do not already have strong principles of freedom of speech and expression. In addition, the agreement negotiations, which took place without the contributions of civic groups or elected representatives, have been widely described as undemocratic.
Although Slovenia also signed the agreement, their ambassador, Helena Drnovšek Zorko, has publicly apologized to her country for doing so, saying that it was a mistake.
I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention.
Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.
The final version of ACTA is also very watered down from what it once was.
Here are some major improvements:
The provision that proposed to criminally punish ordinary users (think college kid downloading music) with fines, jail time, seizure of computers, etc., was significantly scaled back as the negotiation process moved on and finally eliminated in the final text.
The provision that required all ACTA countries to hold third parties, such as ISPs and consumer electronics manufacturers, liable for their customers’ infringement was eliminated. This provision, as drafted, was inconsistent with U.S. law and would have required changes to this complex and evolving policy space.The provision that required countries to institute safe harbors for ISPs from their customer’s infringement was eliminated. While the idea of providing ISPs with a safe harbor is a good one and facilitates the development of platforms and services on the Internet, the way in which ACTA would have required these safe harbors was not good. It lacked safe guards for users that are contained in U.S. law. Further, it could have provided the excuse for measures such as three strikes and deep packet inspection.
The DRM provisions of ACTA were improved significantly. Earlier leaked drafts had called upon countries to prevent circumvention of DRM, treat them as both civil and criminal offenses, and consider them illegal even when there was no underlying attempt to infringe copyright. Furthermore, these drafts had not acknowledged that circumvention could be done for lawful purposes. The final text overcomes these deficiencies and gives countries flexibility in how they implement DRM provisions.
ACTA hasn’t been ratified in Europe yet, so there’s still time to protest it if you care anything at all about democracy and free speech. Protests are being called for on Saturday, 11 February 2012 across Europe.
If you’re still confused about ACTA, visit EFF’s page or this discussion on reddit.
Talk by Arvind Narayanan at the Governance of Social Media Workshop Nov 11, 2011.
