G8 Pushes for Anti Piracy Trade Agreement
During their annual summit meeting in Japan, the G8 members agreed to get the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) ready for implementation by the end of the year. The agreement, pushed by multimillion dollar companies, will open the doors to a digital police state, much to the pleasure of the MPAA and RIAA.
At this EU meeting, it was made absolutely explicit that ACTA is in large part about updating legal frameworks to take account of P2P and developments on the Internet. The previous regime to deal with IP and piracy, TRIPS was 12 years old, officials said, and the Internet had ‘not existed in the same way’ when TRIPS was drafted. In this respect, the hints we have about what might make it into ACTA from a list of suggestions the RIAA obtained by Knowledge Ecology International (which has been double checked for veracity) are very important. More than any other lobby, of course, the RIAA is dealing with issues specifically related to the Net. This gives some pointers of where ACTA could go if the anti-piracy and IP lobbies get their way.
In its statement, ICC also exhorts the G8 to pay heed to the issues facing world business. One of them is Strengthen intellectual property protection.
G8 countries must also be exemplary in their protection of intellectual property, since due to lack of adequate safeguards counterfeiting and piracy are robbing the global economy of an estimated $600 billion annually.
To that end, ICC recommends the G8 work toward prohibiting trans shipments of fake goods through free-trade zones and promoting minimum global standards in enforcement of IP rights.
IICC’s initiative, Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP), is a well-established forum of companies and industry associations which are raising governmental and public awareness on the scale of this illegal activity and the widespread harm it does.
Source: TorrentFreak
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