My friend and colleague the Technoloma claims that ACTA has turned out to be a damp squid. He and I are in agreement on many issues, but this is an issue on which we come to different conclusions.

The reason that technollama gives for concluding: “at the moment it seems like the worst has been taken out of the agreement” is that the agreement as it now stands, and as technollama reads it, does not require statutory damages for copyright infringement, nor do the indisputably worrying intermediary liability provisions require 3 strikes style policing from Internet service providers.

However from the perspective of developing countries, a perspective which I’d expect technollama to understand and value, these are not have and have not been the primary problems with ACTA.

Instead there are a host of other problems with ACTA which will immediately hurt the poorest people in the world. I’ve set these out extensively in this working paper which is updated to take into account changes made to the draft treaty. Two of the most obvious are the squeezing of access to medicines and the future of the global intellectual property system. Already European customs officials are intercepting legitimate generic medicines being shipped through Europe to developing countries on the basis of spurious claims of trademark confusion. ACTA will require other countries to deprive poor people of medicines too.

In any event the mere existence of ACTA would if it is signed undercuts the legitimacy of WIPO and the WTO. It signals very strongly that not only are the developing countries unable to control the rent seeking of a few powerful corporations in their own countries but that they are willing to use their power to further that rent seeking in the rest of the world. This can only undermine the legitimacy of the global trading system, and a make a trade war more likely.