Draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Finally Published

A draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has finally been published. ACTA has been negotiated and discussed in secret between leading Governments for over two years (including North America, Europe, Japan and Korea), and there has been a lot of concern over what it contained. Now we know. Legal immunity that Internet service providers currently have from copyright infringing material passing over their networks will be subject to them taking appropriate action to try to curtail it. There are two options. One is to require ISPs to have appropriate policies in place to stop the activity from happening, including ultimately terminating users' Internet access. The other would involve ISPs stopping the infringing material itself from being accessed. It had been feared that ACTA would require people to be searched for copyright infringing material when entering or exiting a country, but those provisions are not in there.