2/15/2012 1:53 PM ET
(RTTNews) - A little over a month into 2012, the so-called "World Web War" has moved from fighting legislation in one country to combating a larger, global bid to bring the Internet under the yoke of stringent copyright law. With the U.S.'s Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and Protect IP Act, or PIPA, both now on the back burner, protest groups are now taking the fight to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA.
Unlike SOPA/PIPA, whose legal remit was confined to the United States, ACTA, being principally a trade agreement, has worldwide consequences. Also, although negotiations on ACTA date back to 2006 and 2007, it was "non-transparent" until May 2008, when a draft was posted to the Internet by WikiLeaks. It was only in 2010 that an official version was made public, and a "final text," dated April 2011, features Japan as a "depositary" and signatories include Australia, Canada, and France, besides the United Kingdom and the United States. On January 26, 2012, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan reported a ceremony where the EU and 22 of its Member States signed the agreement.
Another area of divergence from SOPA/PIPA is ACTA's stated aim of countering counterfeiting of goods and medicines, besides Internet-related intellectual property rights. It is seen as creating a supranational body that seeks to work outside of established trade organizations such as the World Trade Organization. Members of the WTO have expressed concern about a possible conflict between ACTA and the currently existing Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPs, which first brought intellectual property laws into the ambit of international trading. While ACTA and TRIPs both seek convergence on such issues as copyright and patent infringement, critics have argued that developed nations propagate, among other things, the threat of counterfeiting as a counter to the legal trade of generic drugs.
In the limelight, however, are intellectual property rights, especially those that relate to digital, Internet-based content. Among those who participated in discussions on ACTA were such U.S.-based organizations as the Business Software Alliance, the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, and the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, all of which are part of the International Intellectual Property Alliance, or IIPA. Both the MPAA and RIAA found themselves the focus of much opprobrium for their vociferous backing of SOPA and PIPA. One commentator called ACTA "an attempt to push the Digital Millennium Copyright Act onto the rest of the world," albeit without such safeguards as provided by domestic U.S. law.
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