The draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was released yesterday, and there’s a lot of buzz because it does not contain a “three-strikes” rule for those who illegally download copyrighted material. Here are some links to some of the coverage and commentary:
Rashmi Rangnath, staff attorney for Public Knowledge, provides an analysis and commentary, here.
Joelle Tessler of the Associated Press focuses on technology companies’ fears that the provisions could open the door to “second liability,” here.
Nate Anderson of Ars Technica has a round-up of reactions from different types of stakeholders, here, while Juliana Gruenwald of the National Journal provides more reactions here.
On NPR, perhaps Canadian law professor Michael Geist said it best:
If you’ve got Europe and the United States and Australia and other countries all claiming that ACTA is fully consistent with their domestic laws, they can’t all be right, or at least they can’t all be right once an agreement is finally concluded. And it seems to me more likely that they’ll all be wrong, that in a sense, everybody is going to have to make some shifts, and everybody is going to face some amount of change on the domestic front.