Meet ACTA, SOPA's big brother

Following black-out protests from Wikipedia, Google, Tumblr and other websites, the USA’s Stop Online Piracy Act failed to get through Congress this week. The act –which as one viral image pointed out would mean that illegally downloading a Michael Jackson song would get you five years in jail, as opposed to the four years that Conrad Murray got for killing the King of Pop – was derailed by the sweeping internet protests.

It wasn’t all bad for the movie and music distributors, though, as one of the biggest file-sharing sites, Megaupload was pulled down by the FBI, and its boss was arrested for copyright infringements. German programmer and the man behind Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, also provided the industry with a handy villain – a luxury-car driving lump of a man, with a history of insider dealing and hacking. Dotcom is currently awaiting extradition to the US from New Zealand, where by all accounts, his neighbours will be glad to see the back of him.

The attempt to institute more robust laws against online piracy is not over in the States, but the bill’s backers have now promised to redraft to remove some of the features that critics warned might “break the internet”.

However, as the noisy battle raged in the States, SOPA’s big brother was sneaking through in Europe. Yesterday, the UK and 21 other European Union member states signed an international copyright agreement treaty called Acta (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), sparking protests among internet users who fear it will lead to increased online censorship. In a dramatic and unusual development, Kader Arif, the EU ‘rapporteur’ for ACTA (essentially the guy in charge of the scrutinising process) handed in his report and immediately quit to “denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement”. Arif claimed that right wing forces were trying to rush the act through in a bid to deceive the European public.

ACTA, activists warn, has much of the worst of SOPA. Though it has been signed, however, that does not mean it will come into force. Maybe it’s time Europe made some noise in the way the US successfully did, in time to stop the European Parliament ratifying an act that affects us all, before we’ve had time to work out what it means.