Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and its Relationship with Internet

Anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) is a plurilateral agreement among industrialized countries including USA. Top industrialized countries and in particular USA always tried to have complete control over world trade organization (WTO). Although they had many success for their purpose, they are not convinced about the WTO functions and they can not tolerate critiques of their opponents in WTO, so they were looking for a way to bypass the WTO. In 2006 Japan and USA prepared an initial proposal and tried confidentially to attract other industrialized counties into their agreement. Under the cover of fighting good counterfeit, this agreement aimed to legally enforce the intellectual property rights and total control over Internet communications. They aimed for new standards and system of laws independent of existing international organizations and countries to establish a new governing body outside of the body of existing countries. All these efforts were to forcibly implement the intellectual property right and copyright law by implementing total control on the Internet as the main media for copyright infringement. This article has been written to shed some light on the issue and disclosing the hidden parts of this agreement.