Could Cybercrime Treaty Already Push Through Some Of The Worst Of ACTA?

from the international-obligations dept

One of the important aspect of the leaked copy of the ACTA draft a little while back was that it also included what each of the different parties was pushing for in terms of language choices. This part of the draft was conveniently missing from the "official" draft that was released recently. But, if you looked through the different changes being pushed for by different countries, you quickly realized that definitions mean everything. The different wording seemed to only differ slightly, but depending on how you defined different terms, the actual meaning could be night and day. And, indeed, supporters of ACTA have been working overtime to make reading the draft seem innocuous, while making sure that the definitions make ACTA much more powerful.

Among the concerns is how "criminal copyright infringement" is defined -- specifically, what counts as "commercial scale." In ACTA, there's been an attempt to define commercial scale as broadly as possible, including copying for personal use.

Richard points us to some news down in Australia, where there's some concern that Australia's recent decision to sign on to a European cybercrime treaty, could force it to define criminal copyright infringement extremely broadly, along the lines of ACTA -- effectively getting that part of ACTA agreed to with or without ACTA. In other words, as plenty of folks interested in this stuff have been focused on ACTA, was the entertainment industry able to back door this really bad aspect of ACTA into many countries via the Cybercrime treaty already?

Filed Under: acta, australia, commercial scale, copyright, criminal copyright, cybercrime treaty