At our year-end festivus a couple months ago (still can’t believe it’s a new decade), we (wait, I) reported on movements of The Pirate Bay (TMT Feature). Of particular note, we mentioned that Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations will likely continue in January in Stockholm, HQ of the rising Pirate Party. And since January was just last month, it was only a matter of time before someone leaked a memo or a draft or something…
Oh, hey look! A leaked draft of ACTA (PDF)!
While you can read all the juicy legal and political details there, we can summarize the important information in two sentences:
• Good News: Graduated response (a.k.a., three-strikes) is off the table, at least on a mandatory legal level (it is still “encouraged”).
• Bad News: The treaty will basically implement the rules from the US’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act on an international scale.
While this basically means that Americans like you and I will barely notice any significant changes to the law on a national level, our brethren across both ponds will start to feel the effects of the draconian DMCA, with all the good (ISP safe harbor rules, fair use exemptions) and bad (takedown notices, DRM everywhere) features. It’s like a Toyota Corrolla: it’s great, if you get past the fact that two key components can hurt you. Canadians will also take concern, as the takedown model runs against their model of notice-and-notice, which has been successful.
You may wonder why the DMCA’s in play. Turns out the majority of proposals in play were proposed by the US delegation, with backing from Vice President Biden and Attorney General Holder, as well as the RIAA. That said, it will be hard to impose what is essentially a US treaty on other nations, and the EU has already begun to push back. Further, with graduated response — the savior of both the RIAA and the IFPI (its international counterpart) — being mostly pushed aside, their position has been weakened significantly, as we will be reporting later this week. (Stop by, there’ll be pancakes.) Still, the industry is in a promising position, with new rounds of talks happening in March and June, signifying an attempt at completion by the end of the year.
Perhaps, worse comes to worse, we could always call Ron Paul.
