Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement And The Internet Piracy

Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement and the Internet Piracy.

At first, Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement was presented as an equalization of the trade laws on the international scale. However, the main focus was the fight against violations of intellectual rights and copyrights. “ACTA is primarily a copyright treaty, masquerading as a treaty that addresses dangerous medicines and defective imports.” (Kaminski, 2011, p. 2.) Only later on, it became clear that this trade agreement was highly focused on violations that occur in virtual world. “Looking back on the round-by-round evolution of ACTA's terms, it seems safe to say that the Internet provisions were among the agreements most contested and heavily negotiated.” (Bridy, 2011, p. 577.). ACTA was meant as a source of justice for copyright and it penalizes all the infractions done on the web. This is its purpose but people have extrapolated its purpose and made it so as an attack on each person’s privacy. This is simply an excuse to allow people to be able download media files and other programs illegally. As all humanity, people want to do what they like and if that opportunity is taken away from them they react like when a child has had its toy taken away. People do not want to give up their easy access to the vast treasury of files that they want and have to pay for it because it is so much easier this way. People are egocentric and they want to do what they want without having any consideration for anybody else’s concern.

It may seem that it is only beneficial to those who sell the legal digital items, but when you look deeper into it, common buyers of the digital goods are suffering too. Yet again, Mark Warner explains that piracy affects the base price of the products. For example, when company produces software in which they invested a lot and someone down the street is selling cheap copies of it, the company is forced to increase its product price so that it would make up for the loss of money because of illegal distribution of their software. And such things are not only bound to software, it also includes the downloading of movies, music and other various materials. In addition to that, the price of the goods is also increased because companies are investing lots of money so that it would be hard to copy and duplicate their products.