ACTA is an international treaty which has been largely negotiated in secret and outside the WTO/WIPO UN bodies. It aims to protect Intellectual Property, but in doing so may well attack our fundamental freedoms.
ACTA locks-in existing copyright laws making it difficult to revise these, which everybody knows needs doing
ACTA creates two illegalities:
1 copyright infringement and
2 inducement, leading or pushing others, to infringe copyright
This second one is a secondary infringement or secondary liability issue. Under it the VCR may never have existed…cassette tapes either, as they could be seen to induced infringement… and now our web indexers, like even Google, and ISPs come under the spotlight as inducers!
There is also the notion of contributory infringement (when you are more actively involved) this is entirely unclear.
ACTA expands copyright law. Non-commercial file sharing (i.e. copyright infringement - a civil issue) is turned into commercial scale criminal infringement. It also introduces criminal aiding and abetting. Allowing the entertainment industries to off load law enforcement to governments (paid by tax payers!!)
Copyright is a balance of good and bad. It is good to pay artists, bad to allow the entertainment industry to profit from outrageous control of media (release windows, by time and place, control over distribution mediums such as DVD or download, control over personal copying to get your CD or DVD on your computer). And even worse the concept that you do not own a DVD content that you have paid for, just a licence to view it in the way the industry allows you. Ridiculous!
ACTA presents copyright as only good, it talks of enforcement only, and ignores the exceptions (fair use/dealing, public domains, first sale, library loaning…) that make copyright work.
ACTA mandates non-use of tools that break DRM, intended to protect copyright: but this plays directly into the hands of the entertainment industry's business model preventing fair use of works you have purchased (e.g. copy a DVD to computer, photo an artists picture to put in your photo library).
ACTA gives our boarder controllers or bodies like Ofcom rights to examine your computer and confiscate it..but it is very difficult for them to know what is infringing. So it allows the media industry to demand "take downs" without due legal process.
Time to object and force a proper debate about the future of copyright and the way the media industries conduct their business.
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