Given easy access to the Internet, the source of so much information, one might expect that Internet activists would be the best informed on the facts. But the continuing recent debate over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) reminds us that, even in the Internet age, truth is a quick casualty of war.

We debunked a few of the most common canards about ACTA earlier this week, but the rhetorical temperature has since been raised even further. It's worth clearing the air on a few more items.

SOPA-style site takedowns

We already debunked the idea that ACTA demands ISPs to monitor their users for copyright infringement. But a similar claim has been widely repeated: ACTA is basically SOPA in that it envisions takedowns of specific websites.

As a recent DailyTech article put it, "Say a foreign business wants to get rid of its American e-commerce portal rival. It could simply masquerade as a reviewer and post a link to infringed content (e.g. a torrent on The Pirate Bay) and then turn around and request a takedown. Bam! The successful American firm would be out of the picture, at least until it could prove its innocence weeks later after millions in lost business."

This has so little basis in the actual ACTA text it's hard to know what to say. It's simply fantasy. Nothing in ACTA asks any signatory to allow takedowns of entire websites, in other countries, based simply on a letter, and because of something like a single user-submitted link to infringing content. (ACTA footnote 13 expressly allows countries to provide "safe harbors" to Internet-based operators.)

ACTA does require countries to provide for judicial injunctions to stop piracy, but such injunctions have been hallmarks of the European and US law for an extremely long time. However, as with most parts of ACTA, the language is extremely broad and certainly doesn't require anything like the doomsday scenarios envisioned above.

Impeach Obama?

Yes, President Obama is responsible for overseeing the ACTA signing and allowing the process to continue. But ACTA began under President Bush, whose US Trade Representative (USTR) helped craft the ACTA approach. The agreement is more a product of the terrific power of copyright holders, especially at places like USTR, and an excellent example of their multiple-front fight for ever-tougher enforcement. They fight in Congress, in the Executive branch, through the courts, and internationally; shut down something like SOPA and you'll find the groundwork already laid elsewhere for things like ACTA.

Given this reality, statements like this one from DailyTech, border on the unhinged (see if you can find the bonus Nazi allusion in the piece):

Under such a common sense principle, President Obama appears to have accepted a bribe to violate the US Constitution and the highest political office [by signing ACTA], thus he should be impeached under this definition.

This is in reference to an administration routinely criticized for being too close to Google and which Hollywood is publicly threatening over the White House refusal to back SOPA. Deranged.

Secret, but not anymore

These articles also claim that ACTA's secrecy—certainly one of its most obvious real flaws—was far more extreme than it actually was. "A handful of nations have defied the U.S. and published the latest draft of ACTA," wrote DailyTech. "ACTA is being carried out in secret through the use of executive orders, so in effect it isn’t available for public review, you can’t read it," wrote another author in a follow-up at the site pnosker.

Even a key Anonymous Twitter account, AnonyOps, reacted to our last article on Anonymous misinformation by writing, "Remember, #ACTA text was kept secret for years. This made knowing what it actually says almost impossible."

Almost impossible? The text was leaked routinely during negotiations. Ars wrote about the changing contents of the agreement for more than four years.

On April 21, 2010—nearly two years ago—the ACTA group officially released the consolidated draft text, which turned out to be quite close to the final version. (I still remember staying up until 3 am, waiting for the draft to be released in Europe in order to do a lengthy writeup on its contents.)

On October 6, 2010, the countries negotiating ACTA released a "near-final" text to the public.

On November 15, 2010, the final ACTA text was released. All three versions are linked directly from the USTR's official ACTA page.

The process around ACTA was rotten, but those who claim today that the secrecy of it prevents them from accurately learning what's in it simply haven't bothered to look.

The ACTA Committee

ACTA sets up a new "ACTA Committee" (see Article 36). Sound scary? One EU group organizing an anti-ACTA petition thinks so. ACTA would "set up a shadowy new anti-counterfeiting body to allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties—even prison sentences—against people they say have harmed their business."

But the Committee is administrative. It oversees the agreement text, it coordinates between member states, and it decides if other countries are allowed to join. Setting up such a new group outside the existing multilateral systems in place at organizations like WIPO creates problems—but they are more boring "governance" type problems instead of "shadowy" police problems.

The ACTA Committee expressly disdains such an enforcement role. "For greater certainty, the Committee shall not oversee or supervise domestic or international enforcement or criminal investigations of specific intellectual property cases," the ACTA text says. This is not Interpol for P2P networks, though ACTA does envision more direct contacts between existing international police units.

iPod searches

One of our first articles on ACTA debunked the idea that rightsholders and countries wanted to use the treaty to search individual iPods for infringing music and movies at the border. That was never a goal, and the final ACTA text makes clear that countries may decide not to bother with "small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in travellers’ personal luggage."

And yet we're still seeing stuff like this: "Customs agents will sift through your iPod playlist for illegally downloaded music and through your laptop for illegally downloaded movies." It could happen for other reasons, of course, but not because ACTA demands it.

Sweet sanity



The obvious danger in all this is that complete fabrications might be used to fan the flames of anti-ACTA protest in Europe, where the issue has become hot, hot, hot the last two weeks. (Poland is already making it clear that ACTA might not survive a ratification vote.) But misinformation only makes it easy for ACTA supporters to marginalize the opposition as irrelevant fanatics.

Fortunately, most of the digital rights groups are putting out decent information on ACTA. (See information from the EFF and EDRI, for instance.)

ACTA is the highest-level international IP agreement ever signed, and as such will be used by countries like the US as the new standard when negotiating free trade agreements and other deals. It incorporates stronger measures for things like ex officio searches, under which the government actually seizes goods it believes to be counterfeit without first getting a rightsholder complaint. The secretive process was ridiculous—what confidential information was ever at stake? And the attempt to use such agreements to bind Congress into ever-tougher IP enforcement is simply leading an entire generation of young people to disdain copyrights as the copyright lobby overreaches.

But these issues aren't as sexy. Much better, if you want to get people in the streets, to call it "SOPA cranked up to 11" and depict ACTA as a mandate for Internet monitoring and site-blocking. As a short-term strategy, it's clear that this works, but it's not a long-term recipe for countering the actual systemic problems around digital copyrights—of which ACTA is merely the latest symptom.