CNNMoney contributor Dan Mitchell suggests that the same social media forces that helped stop the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills have also led to the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
The agreement “would have created standards for enforcing intellectual property rights across borders. ACTA would have applied not only to copyrights on media products like music and movies transmitted over the Internet, but also to trademarks and patents,” writes Mitchell. “So it also targeted people trying to move knockoff Gucci handbags and fake pharmaceuticals from one country to another.”
“There are two essential reasons for the widespread public outcry that ACTA has met with: the initial secrecy of the negotiations and the stunning vagueness of the agreement’s language,” he adds. “The negotiations were held behind closed doors, without input from either the general public or from public-interest groups. And the terms were so murky that it was impossible to tell what enforcement tactics would and would not be allowed.”
Opponents were to quick to warn that ACTA would lead to what the Free Software Foundation described as “a culture of surveillance and suspicion.”
The speedy organization of online protests that resulted once ACTA was revealed shows the growing power of social tools such as Facebook and Twitter.
“Politicians and owners of intellectual property would do well to keep that in mind as they try to create enforcement policies,” suggests Mitchell. “A good start would be to more directly target profiteers rather than innocent third parties, and to ensure that any laws or trade agreements adhere to basic democratic principles, such as due process of law.”
CNNMoney contributor Dan Mitchell suggests that the same social media forces that helped stop the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills have also led to the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
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