A new international intellectual property agreement is in the works people! You didn’t know? Oh that’s right they didn’t tell us. Here is an article on it :http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=ae997868-220b-4dae-bf4f-47f6fc96ce5e&p=1
At first the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) was proposed to hinder large scale piracy for profit, however, now it seems that this document and its consequent enforcement could bode bad for travelers. As you may, or may not know, in Canada the border patrol already checks laptops and similar items for child pornography, but now this scrutiny is extended to one of the most common items while traveling, IPods and mp3 players. The government must be nuts to want to try and check peoples personal media devices. I would love to see the look of the border patrols face when he realizes that iPods have ridiculous storage space, for example my iPod can hold up to 60 GB of data, that is roughly equivalent to 50 000 songs depending on length and quality. How impractical would it be to ask a border guard to look through my 50 000 song collection and determine which songs are illegal, because apparently the officer checking is at liberty to decide what is considered infringement (I hope they at least release some form of guideline for the poor officers). The agreement is said to possibly alter the status quo of ISPs holding out for their customers, as of now there must be reasonable suspicion and a court order to access ISP info for individuals, but all that might change. Anti piracy laws are important as intellectual property becomes more and more of a commodity in our modern civilization. Then why is it that this agreement is being formulated behind closed doors?, and also kept relatively secret from the people. For us Canadians in particular the people don’t even need to be asked in this matter, since it is a federal trade agreement, we the people have no say! It is preposterous that such an important matter will not be run by the people for approval. Even if it was just ongoing information about the establishment process to keep us up to date, it would be a big step towards fair democracy. This agreement could prove tricky an turbulent for Canadian politics since once this international agreement is signed it will be hard for Canada to back out (as outline in the article above), so the Canadian government could be putting itself between a rock and a hard spot, namely the Canadian people and the other nations abiding by the ACTA. The ironic thing in this situation is that a few details of the ACTA were obtained by a leak that fortunately found its way to the internet, possibly the most concerned audience. This leak in a way is intellectual property theft, (even thought this agreement is probably not copy written).
What do you think of the fact that the Canadian people don’t need to be asked on this matter?
What do you think about the way this agreement is being formulated?
How effective do you think this agreement will be at eradicating piracy?
