G8 summit aims to stop piracy once and for all

Posted at: 3:30pm 3rd July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

ACTA proposes international piracy laws, border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates

While the headlines surrounding next week’s G8 summit mostly concern climate change and development in Africa, there’s also a new international plan for piracy measures being discussed, which could have a dramatic effect on international file sharing. This is briefly mentioned as ‘protection of intellectual property rights’ on the official G8 website, but it could potentially completely change the way in which they law deals with pirates.

According to New Scientist, the talks will be based around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which has some scary ramifications for file sharers. In case you’re unfamiliar with ACTA, it’s a potential trade agreement between several countries, including the US, the European Commission, Switzerland, Australia and Japan, which was first proposed in October 2007.

Little has been officially announced about ACTA yet, but WikiLeaks published a leaked document about it a few weeks ago, which reveals an international strategy for cracking down on piracy. This is proposed as a solution to the current problem where different copyright laws in different countries make it difficult to crack down on international Internet pirates.

According to the leaked document, ACTA proposes new border measures to control international piracy, including the ex officio (by right of office) authority for customs authorities to suspend import, export and trans-shipment of suspected IPR (intellectual property rights) infringing goods, as well as the authority to impose deterrent penalties.

The proposed policies on Internet file sharing are particularly interesting too, as they potentially move the liability for copyrighted material from ISPs and place them on the user instead. According to the document, ACTA would include ‘safeguards for ISPs from liability, to encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders in the removal of infringing material.’ As well as this, ISPs would also have to provide the details of suspected copyright infringers if requested. Copyright holders who’ve given notification of copyright infringement would legally be able to ‘obtain information identifying the alleged infringer.’