Even after what will come to be known as the Great Media Blackout of 2012 (when Google, Reddit, Youtube and other various sites “blacked out” in protest of SOPA and PIPA), the government is still trying to wage its war on internet piracy with a giant cannon, pushing through a new international treaty called ACTA, which stands for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
For those unfamiliar with SOPA and PIPA, get a quick refresher. ACTA, the international version, was signed on October 1, 2011 by Australia, Canada, the European Union (EU) — represented by the European Commission and the EU Presidency and the EU member states — Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States.
But what is ACTA? ACTA is an attempt to weed out counterfeit production in all forms (it spends most of the text talking about moving objects across borders), and has been extended to apply to the Internet as well. It basically is an agreement by the signed countries that they will crack down on counterfeit production and piracy.
In theory, signing this agreement is not a hellish decision. It is trying to ensure that each site has a purpose and trying to prevent (as a Redditor would say) reposts of original material. So, although many people are complaining that this violates free speech, it doesn’t. It just tries to ensure that those people who are exercising free speech for profit get their “fair share."
This logic breaks down right around the point when it becomes quite apparent that the main supporters of this law are the entertainment industry behemoths, people who quite obviously shoveled mountains of cash down the throats of politicians in Washington in a half-baked attempt to get these laws through. Reading down the supporters of SOPA and PIPA reads like a who’s who in the entertainment industry: Disney, Paramount, CBS, NBC-Universal, Adidas, all the major sports networks in this country, Sony, Time Warner and Viacom, just to name a few big ones. But there are also supporters like Visa and Mastercard. Previous tech supporters include GoDaddy, Microsoft, EA and Nintendo.
Such an act, while intended to prevent copyright infringement, also indirectly hurts the global (and local) economy. Sites like Dropbox are in direct violation of ACTA, because all they do is host content, whether it be original or not (more likely not). Even sites that are more notorious for illegal downloading still serve a legitimate purpose: online repositories of data.
As more and more data storage moves to the cloud, sites like Megaupload and Dropbox serve legitimate purposes because they allow workers in different parts of the world to simultaneously access data and files from one online source.
Taking out these sites and punishing their owners is fine because they “condoned” piracy, but that still not only hurts the people who were legitimately using the sites, it hurts the productivity of the companies they work for, who have a global presence. As many students know from experience, it’s much easier to just upload a file to a Dropbox where everyone can access it rather than repeatedly emailing a file back and forth. And not everyone knows how to use a git repository.
There is one line in the text, however, that essentially ensures that it won’t have any effect: “Procedures adopted, maintained, or applied to implement this Chapter shall be fair and equitable. They shall not be unnecessarily complicated or costly, or entail unreasonable time-limits or unwarranted delays.” It’s the first statement under article 2.X: General Obligations with Respect to Enforcement.
The one thing that unites almost all of the countries that signed the treaty is they all have rather large, bureaucratic governments. Most of the countries that signed ACTA spend more than half of their budget paying government wages. Such an act would certainly require (in this administration’s case) lots of government oversight. That means a whole new division of government to function as the internet police. That’s a $1 billion investment that a country $14 trillion in debt simply cannot afford. That is unnecessarily complicated and costly.
Finally, although ACTA is an attempt to prevent counterfeit production, it fails to consider that the Internet has no borders. There is no “American” internet. There are websites based in America. But they are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. The whole point of the Internet is to erase borders and create one global community. Where do you put checkpoints and borderlines when the whole point is to cross between them freely?
ACTA is a nice idea in theory, but instead of being surgical and trying to weed out piracy, the government is trying to stop piracy on the seas of the Internet by dropping a nuke on it. This method, concocted by special interests, not only makes America worse, but shows us exactly what is wrong with our government today.
