On 26 January the Polish ambassador to Japan, among other EU member states representatives, signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. What sounds like unremarkable news is in fact crucial – this event sparked a wave of social opposition Poland has never witnessed in its post-transformation history. The Anonymous hackers group blocked websites of the Polish prime minister and the government (granted, this wasn’t much of an achievement – the username was admin1, password: admin1, demonstrating the full depth of the Polish authorities’ understanding of the term ‘internet security’). Anti-ACTA protesters at first organised online and then took to the streets in their thousands, putting Poland at the forefront of a global protest movement against the agreement.

All with good reason. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been negotiated by a small number of states including EU members, Japan, Australia and the USA since 2007. Ostensibly, it is being put into place to establish international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement, thereby benefitting intellectual property and patent holders. Crucially, the negotiation process has been taking place outside of recognized institutions, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization and with no transparency or social consultation whatsoever. In Poland, official documents specifically prohibiting civil society consultation on the matter have been leaked, although some form of consultations has since taken place (but already after the signature of the agreement).

The outrage, in Poland and globally, has primarily stemmed from the effects that introducing ACTA will have on internet freedom. The protests have stressed the debate on access to culture vs. intellectual property rights. This false dichotomy aside, the introduction of ACTA would be symptomatic of the progressive commercialisation of the exchange of information, a sign that finally, officially, the brand is much more valuable than the product it marks. But the contrived concept of ‘intellectual property’ is not what is most disturbing about the internet regulation aspect of ACTA. What is outright frightening is how it plans to do so, which is by pushing the burden of the responsibility onto internet service providers, forcing them to monitor their users’ access to internet sites to monitor whether or not they engage in counterfeiting activities. If you are looking for sources of erosion of state sovereignty, forget supranational organisations, you’ve struck a goldmine right here! ACTA aims to privatise and commercialise the policing and judiciary system by appointing commercial organisations as arbiters of their users guilt or innocence. In view of the role that internet freedom has played in protest movements in North Africa, Russia and elsewhere in the past year, can we afford the risk of it being taken away from us?

But this is not all. To limit the discussion on ACTA solely to questions of intellectual property and anti-piracy measures would be to trivialise it. Most worryingly, as ACTA would give customs officials the authority to seize products suspected of being similar to trademark brands, it aims to limit access to generic drugs and ‘patented’ seeds on which developing countries rely. Stopping generic medicine has nothing to do with preventing fake medication from entering the market, and everything to do with protecting and increasing the profits of pharmaceutical companies. The dangers of limiting the prevalence of certain crops need no explanation.

The global discussion on ACTA is ongoing – it’s time to start it in Brussels. The European Parliament Committee on International Trade is due to start hearings on ACTA in March, with a vote on ratifying the agreement in June or July. Now is the time for us, European citizens, to act and show our representatives what our position is. ACTA is not in our interest.
 

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