News

Rejection of Acta

After much controversy, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was rejected in the European Parliament on 4th July 2012. With its rejection, this international agreement cannot come into force in the European Union.
ACTA intended to establish international regulations for the compliance of the intellectual property legislation among the participating countries; namely, it intended to standardize the measures to fight against the violation of copyright worldwide.
According to its proponents and followers, ACTA would be an adequate answer to the growing and massive increase of the worldwide circulation of fake goods and of the piracy of works protected by copyright.

However, its opponents (among them, the Internet users and institutions which support them) claim that this agreement would only benefit important corporations and it would have side effects on the civil, digital and freedom of speech rights of the remaining society. They considered the rejection of ACTA to be an “important victory of the civil society”.

Only time will tell how that freedom in the domain of intellectual property will evolve and whether we will be able to find another solution or multinational consensus to regulate that freedom and protect the business community and the authors, who suffer significant losses every year due to Web piracy and importation of counterfeit goods).

The transgressors can take advantage of this non-approval of ACTA to perpetrate, for instance, piracy, counterfeit, illegal downloads… That is, to keep profiting without investing, taking advantage of third parties’ intellectual property which represents millions of jobs over Europe.

Thus, now more than ever, it is necessary that authors, editors, technological and software companies, well, that all the owners and managers of intellectual property rights keep adopting the already existing legal mechanisms, nationally and on a community scale, in order to protect and maintain their rights.

Carmen Sánchez-Puelles