User blog comment:Craiglpalmer/SOPA and PIPA Situation Summary/@comment-4335922-20120127055305

News on the ACTA treaty -,, ,.

The legal scope of ACTA includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet.

The final text treaty was released on 15 November 2010 and a signing ceremony was held on 1 October 2011 in Tokyo, with the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea signing the treaty. The European Union, Mexico, and Switzerland and the EU (less Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Netherlands and Slovakia, which are going through national formalities and procedures first) plan to join soon. When Poland announced on January 19 that it will sign the treaty and then a number of Polish government websites, including that of both the President and Polish Parliament, were shut down by denial of service attacks that started January 21,.

The apparent ultimate objective of ACTA is the when the large emerging economies, where intellectual property rights and copyright enforcement could be improved due to the high level of piracy and fake medicine production, such as China, Russia, India or Brazil, will sign up to it. China has cracked down on fake medicine and toxic baby milk recently, but India has not stopped fake medicine production, while both rip-off music and movie CDs. Nigeria is still riping every thing and evryone off,.

The bill is amid primal at protecting the copyrights of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (which includes the Business Software Alliance, Motion Picture Association of America, and Recording Industry Association of America), and possibly an as yet undisclosed South Korean firm.  It was revealed that in 2009 the following companies also received copies of the draft under a nondisclosure agreement: Google, eBay, Intel, Dell, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, and Verizon. 

Countries would join voluntarily, to create a unaccountable governing body outside of the rules and organisational structure of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.

The European rapporteur for ACTA, Kader Arif, resigned on January 26, 2012, saying it was to draconian and undemocratic. Various groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) oppose ACTA saying it was draughted covertly and without the relevant civil liberties, corporate bodies and developing nations being fairly consulted. Wikileaks, Doctors without Borders, IP Justice, the Canadian Library Association, and the Consumers Union of Japan, and over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents have all criticized it ever since Wikileaks exposed the then covert plan in 2008.