For those of you who are not yet familiar (and as a user of the internet, you very well should be) the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a multinational treaty that is meant to establish international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. Development of the legislation has strongly been influenced by the MPAA (motion picture association of America) and Pharmaceutical Multinationals and has largely left out the public in the development process. Considering the legislation has far reaching consquences for the civil liberties of the average internet user, ACTA has been very controversial world-wide. For this reason the legislation was met with protests across Europe and even the resignation of the chief investigator, Rapporteur Kader Arif when the European Union was called upon to ratify ACTA. Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject ACTA - 478 to 39 - a major set back for the pushers of the treaty. Now, leaked documents have shown that pushers of this legislation are planning to use a backdoor mechanism to implement the ACTA provisions through CETA (Canada - EU Trade Agreement) under the radar. The current sentiment is that Canadian Politicians will only be concerned about this if there is sufficient public outcry over CETA and whether it will be seen as ACTA II in the eyes of the public. Question is whether Canadians will take their civil liberties as seriously as the Europeans do. (May the flaming begin!) for a quick read: http://boingboing.net/?p=170057 For a more in depth analysis comparing ACTA to CETA: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6580/135/
Wait we have a trade agreement with Europe? We do hardly any business with them why do we have one? We will fight against this we like our out of date copyright and intellectual property laws.
It'll be shot down again like the rest of the SOPA and ACTA descendants. "We will fight them on the internet forums. We shall fight them on google. We shall fight them on facebook and on twitter. We shall fight them"
