Secret treaty to enforce worldwide copyright

But no one knows what's in it!

A secret treaty might bind the world's countries to act as copyright cops, but no one other than a few lawyers for big corporations is allowed to read the draft.

According to Ars Technica, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will include a section on Internet "enforcement procedures".

The ACTA has worried a lot of people by threatening to become a means for the US to impose its bizarre copyright laws on the rest of the world.

While many have viewed the US government as the movie and music industries' enforcer, there have been some countries that have had a fairly sane view of so-called 'piracy' of copyrighted content and peer-to-peer filesharing on the Internet.

Politicians have known for some time that bringing the sorts of laws that the US wants into free democratic countries might make them about as popular as Gordon Brown, so apparently they have insisted that the agreement be kept secret.

However Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) found out that the US Trade Representative's office had been secretly canvassing opinions on the Internet section of the agreement from 42 people, all of whom had signed nondisclosure agreements before being shown the ACTA draft text.

Those who have been shown the draft text, which we cannot see, are members of the Business Software Alliance and people at Google, Ebay, Verizon, the Consumer Electronics Association, Intel, Dell, the Center for Democracy and Technology, News Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Time Warner, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Entertainment Software Association and the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights, as well as bizarrely the Zippo Manufacturing Company.

While it looks like the secret treaty has been handed to Big Content on a plate, actually there are a few people on the list who hate Big Content's 'anti-piracy' campaign and all who sail in her.

However one person on the list is none other than Steven Metalitz, who told the Copyright Office that consumers have no right to be upset after buying DRMed music from a store that goes out of business and takes its DRM servers offline.

Certainly the list is stacked against defenders of people's rights and in favour of the content cartels.

When ACTA negotiations resume in early November in Seoul, South Korea, it seems that the corporations will have had enough time to give their countries' leaders a Chinese burn and tell them what they have to do. Then an agreement will be announced as an accomplished fact that will require all governments to cart people off to jail for copying a DVD that they bought.