ACTA: Burning the library of Alexandria

By Cristina Brooks

­­As the EU rushes to pass a law allowing government searches of smartphones and laptops for copyrighted text, protests are breaking out across Europe. 

Protesters are worried about the passing of a law couched in terms so broad it could put anyone who shares a chicken soup recipe in jail.

In summary, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) creates a new international organization, run by the US and copyright holding corporations, to demand trials for anyone anywhere in the world believed to be sharing corporate-owned written text on the internet. The impact this could have on journalists and educators is huge.

ACTA began in the US government. In response to a lobby by US politicians with film industry funding, the Bush administration pushed it in an unalterable form onto trade partner nations in the attempt to make it enforceable worldwide.

As late as 2009, members of press, government, civil liberties, internet and consumer advocacy groups issued standard legal requests to European, Australian, and US governments to find out what was in the treaty, and received curt denials from their respective governments.

The UK’s Department for Innovation and Skills denied a Freedom of Information Request by British researcher Peter Brett in 2009, saying it was for the public’s own good that it didn’t know the names of officials debating the treaty or its contents.

The negotiating parties finally released the full text in April, 2010, two years after it was leaked by Wikileaks, leading activists to suggest lawmakers meant to keep it a secret so the public could not intelligently protest the line items.

After the EC passed the treaty on January 26, 2012, Karl De Gucht, EC Commissioner for Trade, urged members of the parliament to ignore emails from the public during ratification. 

The EC’s actions show that head-of-state members have something to gain from ACTA. It’s likely that they are beholden to the same film industry barons as the US politicians are.

It’s not just Holloywood that has bones to pick with internet users: The mass media, and publishers also have something to gain (or lose, as it were).

It’s interesting to note publishing/mass media organisations participating in the ACTA include Murdoch’s publishing multinational News Corporation and Google.

The Guardian Media Group’s association, the European Publishers' Council, published this statement in support of ACTA:

"Failure to ratify ACTA would also jeopardise the future of secure copyright protection at EU level just at the moment when the European Commission is about to review the copyright directive.”

This may be why it didn’t get much coverage in the UK.  A spate of articles showed up in UK papers beginning in February 2012, but this was after the treaty was a done deal for 22 EU countries.

Considering publishers have vested interests in winning back their profits from non-profit sites, library sites and blogs, the lack of media coverage is no surprise.

Perhaps this is why The Times’ website had less than two mentions of ACTA in its articles  during the three years in which the public could have protested.

The media’s attention to ACTA has thus far focused on its prevention of production of generic HIV-inhibiting drugs in countries where HIV is rampant, although this is a continuation of TRIPS debates.  

The Guardian has recently expanded coverage of protests by ‘youths’ wearing ‘grinning, moustachioed Guy Fawkes masks that have become a symbol of the hacker group Anonymous’. (The Guardian, 2012)

ACTA’s impact on the written word itself hasn't warranted the same scrutiny.   

If copyrighted text enforcement is rolled out across the internet, the average American could face $4.5bn of liability per year for crimes such as sending emails with a reply function. (Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap, 2011)

This will inevitably impact on what journalists write online, especially on journalists who rely on non-profit information sources such as blogging to connect with non-corporate voices.

Wikilieaks says its existence as a journalistic recourse is threatened: “[the treaty] is designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet.”

“This clause would also negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks.”

If non-profit sites, bloggers, journalists, and mainstream publications are not only deprived of primary texts owned by corporations, but are afraid of using them because their owners have the systems to enforce copyrights, it will neuter whatever is left of the free press.

Well established in our educational institutions is the oldest form of information sharing: the library.  Borrowers pay a nominal fee to access abundant information that is not in and of itself an easily saleable product.

If the internet is today’s ‘library’, then laws like ACTA may well be the equivalent of the fire that destroyed the Ancient Library of Alexandria in 48 BC, the world’s largest at the time.

The catastrophe is generally agreed to have set the advance of civilization back by turning the world’s entire knowledge base into ash.

It is the opinion of this author that criminalizing the sharing of written text, used in the library or journalistic context, means that progress is history.