The European Parliament positions itself as a guardian of privacy, data protection, and freedom from heavy policing by states, but a bill called ACTA is challenging that.



A recent protest in Bulgaria against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement / Reuters

In the wake of the public outcry in the United States over proposed domestic antipiracy legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), international regulation is also taking a hit. The edifice of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) seems to have crumbled. This time, however, it happened in Europe.

The European Commission has suspended ACTA's ratification, shunting it instead into the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This is read by some as a means of putting the debate on ice for a year. ACTA's Commission proponents seem to hope that a favorable ruling by the ECJ will provide the political cover necessary to defuse their critics' arguments that the agreement is a violation of fundamental rights to internet freedom and privacy.

But Brussels' attempt to disarm opponents through a court decision is a fundamental misreading of the scope and intensity of the opposition to ACTA. Major protests took to the streets of European capitals earlier this month, with more than one hundred thousand people in Germany alone. These come on the heels of demonstrations in Warsaw and Prague, and coordinated denial of service attacks by the hackivist group Anonymous on the government websites of Poland and the Czech Republic.

ACTA is a multinational compact that aims at stemming commerce in counterfeit products, generic medicine and web-based copyright infringement. The agreement was signed in Japan in October 2011 by thirty-one governments, mostly advanced industrial economies, including the United States, EU member states, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Of middle- and low-income countries, only Morocco came on board. Russia and China, two of the most notorious countries for their intellectual property rights (IPR) violations on- and offline, stayed away.