Hey guess what!? Now European Wikipedia (after the US Wikipedia yesterday) will have to demonstrate another blackout pretty soon. The plan is simple, sometime in January 2012 most of European Union countries is probably going to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a very controversial international agreement aimed at extermination of piracy and counterfeiting. Information about the date of signing the agreement comes from different rumors on the Internet.

ACTA does not have a good opinion among analysts. This document is accused of imposing the American way of thinking about intellectual property and is often considered to be harmful to innovation in the countries of the Old Continent.

As usual when it comes to censorship all the meetings were held behind closed doors, and after finishing it all in 2010 a document was presented as something beneficial for the economy and of copyright, which you just quickly sign.

The agreement is to have an impact not only on piracy on the Internet, but also on technological progress broadly understood, and even the drug trade.

ACTA protects intellectual property in an aggressive manner and harmful to third parties. The word “industry” is used very often, but there are no mentions of citizen rights.

The definition of commercial-scale infringement of intellectual property in the ACTA is wider than the current law, and according to some may lead to the recognition of journalists as criminals.

Innovation can be risky in financial terms, and for that ACTA may re-build the walls there, where a compromise has been achieved (World Trade Organisation, World Intellectual Property Organization, the TRIPS Agreement and other). The agreement may involve ISPs in the fight against piracy, which could lead to blocking of some services and monitoring of traffic, thus limiting communication and violation of privacy of subscribers. Yet, despite numerous appeals of non-governmental organizations (for example, Internet Society and Panoptykon) nor the Polish government (and other countries I bet) nor the European Parliament does not even mention a word about the consequences of signing the agreement.

More over, The EU Parliament has not even published a commentary and opinion about ACTA and despite the impact of drugs on the market have not examined the text of the commission on health care in the EU. Despite this the act is going to be signed next week (probably).

We’ll be following ACTA news from now on.

Source: DobreProgramy