What is ACTA?
Since Spring 2008, 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 three-strikes schemes and net filtering practices.
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 putting an end to Net neutrality.
See the most worrying provisions under discussions and the three core reasons for rejecting ACTA.
Links on ACTA
- Knowledge Ecology International on ACTA
- Michael Geist on ACTA
- ACTA in New Zealand, information, impact, actions
- La Quadrature du Net dossier on ACTA
