Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement draft, January 2010

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a proposed plurilateral trade agreement for establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement throughout the participating countries.[1] Its proponents describe it as a response "to the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works." The scope of ACTA is broad, including counterfeit goods, generic medicines, as well as "piracy over the Internet".

Critics argue ACTA is part of a broader strategy of venue shopping and policy laundering employed by the trade representatives of the US, EU, Japan, and other supporters of rigid intellectual property enforcement. This strategy entails negotiating for terms in international treaties that might prove too politically unpopular to pass in national assemblies. Similar terms and provisions currently appear in the World Customs Organization draft SECURE treaty, and critics have argued that the anticircumvention provisions of Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were similarly passed after policy laundering via treaties negotiated through the World Intellectual Property Organization.

A document leaked to the public in 2008 includes a provision to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide information about suspected copyright infringers without a warrant. A March 2010 leak included the proposed text for this provision.

The negotiations for the ACTA treaty are conducted behind closed doors and are not part of any international organisation.[2] In October 2007 the USA, the European Commission, Switzerland and Japan first announced that they would negotiate ACTA. Since then the following countries joined the negotiations: Australia, Canada, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.