ACTA cannot be a source of online legislation

A definitive stance against ACTA and a denial of the existence of the piracy problem can only temporarily solve the issue. It is now almost certain that the agreement will not be ratified, but MEPs are unanimous that the failed ACTA will evolve into a new attempt at legislation in the same area, for better or worse.

Opponents of ACTA can be divided into two categories. The first includes those who do not understand its meaning, and the second - those who understand it, but see the inapplicability of the agreement. It is also necessary to make the reservation that those who took to the streets against the agreement are mainly interested in legislation in the field of the Internet, although ACTA was created to protect all kinds of products. For example, the explanation was given that it plays the role of a protector against the spontaneous markets of China, India and Brazil. Regardless of whether the possible implementation of the law in this direction would be effective or not, it brought to the fore far more difficult to solve problems and previously unasked questions.

ACTA mainly concerns two concepts that, although seemingly the same, mean different things and conflict - "copyright" and "property rights".

Copyright is a narrower term than intellectual property law. The product of intellectual labor is a type of property that is often subject to piracy and misuse. Nowadays, intellectual property and information are almost the same thing today.

This is the moment when legal terminology creates logical ideas and legislation formulates an adequate purpose. Yet it is precisely this terminology that remains empty of content. This is because property rights and all legislation in this area are formulated in radically different conditions from those in which institutions are currently trying to implement them.

I predict that it will soon become popular to perceive the idea of copyright as completely invalid and outdated. And to a large extent there is reason for this - it is increasingly evident that intellectual property in a digital environment has value as such for a period that expires the moment the product enters the network. From that moment on, it is practically untraceable. It is no coincidence that the environment in which information is organized on the Internet is called not a market, but a flow. Here comes the first argument of the protesters - any attempt to change the legislation violates the presumption of innocence, which is the basis for the adequate functioning of any democratic society.

Copyright is not obsolete, but the truth is that the tools that protected it in the last century are not applicable in the digital environment. They simply come from another era. Sociologist Daniel Bell makes a very logical argument for this.

He divides societies into three types - pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial. The transition between ours, post-industrial, and the previous one is much more shocking and problematic precisely from the point of view of the transfer and protection of information and goods subject to copyright.

Table 1 shows Bell's categorization of societies and some of their indicators.

The categorization is based on the type of employment of the majority. Investments, i.e. money, go where the people are. If in the first two societies the return could be obvious in the form of resources and their material results (raw materials and manufactured goods), today the funds are invested in products that are to the maximum extent the result of intellectual labor (information, knowledge).

There is no universal unit of measurement for this work, no such remuneration, no packaging to protect it from piracy and theft. There is less in common between a manufactured or industrial product and one created through information processing. If information is considered a product, then another challenge for online legislators is to make a qualitative distinction between information produced and distributed for commercial purposes and for non-commercial purposes.

Yet investments are where the resource is, and the resource in the form of information is abstract, untraceable, and cannot be controlled by either the companies of the rights holders or by trade organizations, even if they have the perfectly logical ethical and moral grounds to demand it. The role that ACTA plays is to protect intellectual property with laws designed for industrial production. Or simply to put the two under a common denominator called "the fight against counterfeiting".

If we take into account the abrupt transition from one form of society to another, it is quite easy to discover where exactly the incompatibility between two apparently reasonable statements in themselves originates:

1. The opinion of the institutions: "Piracy is a crime, it damages producers, authors and unregulated and illegally turns property into an object of free possession."
2. The opinion of everyone else: "ACTA as a brake on information, using the web as a universal tool for unlimited resources and imposing regulation almost on thought and opinion as processes of information generation."

The main reason why the controversy over ACTA will remain relevant long after its signing or non-signing is that it touches on problems that it can formulate but not solve. The arbitrary sanctions that today's protesters are horrified by might cure the symptoms of the piracy problem, but not its cause. Without looking for the culprit among governments, rights holders and trade organizations, market regulation today has one key flaw, which is particularly visible in the case of piracy.

When it comes to "goods" in a commercial sense, the necessary distinction is not made between goods in a digital environment (as information, part of a flow in the online space) and goods that are purchased from the supermarket. Instead , the object of purchase and sale is considered to be the same thing on and off the Internet. The regulation is the same and if we are used to calling the violation "theft" in one case and "sharing" in the other, in a legal sense, this distinction does not exist.

ACTA universalizes penalties - it places the existing offline framework in an online environment where no framework has existed up to this point and it is too late to implement one, as it already exists and is developing due to the very lack of restrictions.

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