Here's what I would propose as arguments in a discussion about ACTA.
Pro ACTA:
Private property is an efficient way of dealing with scarcity of resources in a society with virtually unlimited wants. Information is a unique resource, since it can be multiplied without limit, so in theory it cannot be scarce.
Yet, creating new information requires motivation, and one way to motivate people to innovate is to limit the spread of information, by introducing intellectual property rights. This way people can make profit by renting or selling the right to use the information they create, and use the revenue to innovate further.
Economists still haven't determined conclusively whether piracy and counterfeiting damages the economy or not, yet there is a growing body of evidence that those activities indeed hurt the economy.
An OECD
study about IPRs (intellectual property rights), technology transfers and FDIs (foreign direct investments), indicates that a 1% increase in level of IPR results in a 0,5% increase in FDI for developed countries, and a 1,7% increase for developing ones.
Another OECD
study shows that, globally, piracy and counterfeiting caused a loss of over 250 billion USD to rightholders in 2007 alone, not including pirated and counterfeit goods distributed over the Internet.
The INTA (European Parliament Commitee on International Trade)
study on ACTA brings additonal statistics from pages 36 to 44.
These studies confirm that the existing international legal framework, specifically the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-related Aspects on Intellectual Property Rights), failed to adress the issue of copyright infringement.
Therefore it is necessary, in the face of the growing competition, both fair and unfair, posed by the fast-growing and increasingly innovative economies of Brazil, India and China, to forge a new agreement that expands on TRIPS, that will improve the protection of innovative capacities of developed countries. As developed economies lose their advantage in commodities production and manufacturing, innovation will become increasingly important to creating jobs and sustaining growth in those economies.
Contra ACTA:
Article 1.1.
ACTA states that "nothing in this agreement shall derogate from any international obligation of a Party with respect to any other Party under existing agreements to which both Parties are party". Yet, there are provisions in ACTA which are incompatible with WTO (World Trade Organistion) agreements, TRIPS in particular. Also, in case of the European Union, there are provisions that are incompatible with EU law.
One such provision can be found under the 2nd clause of Article 2.X. It concerns the intellectual property right-holders's right on obtaining information on third parties. Under Article 47 of TRIPS it was optional for parties to the agreement to provide its judicial authorities with the authority, unless this would be out of proportion to the infringement, to order the infringer to provide information on third parties who were involved in production and distribution of infringing goods and services and the channels of their distribution.
Under Article 2.x. of ACTA providing such authority to judicial bodies becomes mandatory, and the principle of proportionality is abandoned.
In ACTA there are no provisions guaranteeing against the misuse of acquired information.
Another troublesome article is Article 23 of ACTA which defines commercial scale activities as "activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage". Interpreted literally, this would mean that a single copy for private or educational use in class could be branded a commercial scale activity. This seems to contradict the conclusions of the 2009 WTO Panel in China, which defines commercial scale infringement as "counterfeiting or piracy carried on at the magnitude or extent of typical or usual commercial activity with respect to a given product in a given market".
To be continued...
