An international trade agreement that could have huge impacts on how people in the Spokane area use social media and the Internet in general may have been stopped by the actions of Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is something many people in the U.S. don't know much about. ACTA is an international treaty that is similar to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Wikipedia recently blocked out its U.S. pages in protest against SOPA and many social media users have spoken out against the bill. However, most experts agree that ACTA could be far worse for people who regularly use the Internet.
According to David Meyer of ZDNet UK, "The chances of [ACTA] becoming law in Europe dwindled suddenly on Friday, after Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said he was suspending ACTA's ratification in his country.
"According to reports, Tusk said on Friday that his government had made insufficient consultations before signing the agreement in late January, and it was necessary to ensure it was entirely safe for Polish citizens.
"Although it is technically a trade agreement, ACTA is effectively an international treaty aimed at criminalising copyright infringement and associated activities.
"Tusk's backtracking could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union. If Poland or any other EU member state, or the European Parliament itself, fails to ratify the document, it becomes null and void across the union. As it stands, there are already five member countries that have not even signed ACTA."
Meyer added that ACTA is considered a "mixed agreement" because it deals in part with criminal law and each country in the EU gets to decide how it handles crime.
"The rules around mixed agreements say the legislatures of every EU member state, as well as the European Parliament, all have to provide ratification. The European Commission confirmed to ZDNet UK that if just one member state does not ratify ACTA, the deal will not enter into force anywhere within the EU," Meyer said.
Tusk's change of heart came after thousands of Polish citizens protested against ACTA and hackers believed to be associated with Anonymous attacked two of Poland's government websites. He said that they had not spent enough time studying how ACTA would affect people's safety before he signed it in late January of this year.
Much like SOPA, ACTA is intended to protect people's intellectual property but it could result in law-abiding citizens being subjected to invasive searches with no probable cause and having their online content blocked because they are suspected of having illegal content on their blogs or other sites they created.
According to E.D. Kain of Forbes, "Few people have heard of ACTA... but the provisions in the agreement appear quite similar to – and more expansive than – anything we saw in SOPA. Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.
"Many of these countries have already signed or ratified it, and the cogs are still turning, with the final real fight playing out in the EU parliament.
"The treaty has been secretly negotiated behind the scenes between governments with little or no public input. The Bush administration started the process, but the Obama administration has aggressively pursued it.
"Indeed, we signed ACTA in 2011.
"According to critics, ACTA bypasses the sovereign laws of participating nations, forcing ISP’s across the globe to act as Internet police.
"Worse, it appears to go much further than the Internet, cracking down on generic drugs and making food patents even more radical than they are by enforcing a global standard on seed patents that threatens local farmers and food independence across the developed world."
If Tusk's change of heart has stopped ACTA, this is a huge victory for web developers and pretty much anyone who uses the Internet. If ACTA still ends up going into effect, people in the Spokane area may want to study it and make certain they don't have anything on their own sites that may result in an investigation.
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