ACTA or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a proposed bit of nastiness from the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, in league with the increasingly onerous United Nations. The main targets: counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet…in other words, it’s a power grab by large media and pharma conglomerates, in league (as always) with big government types looking to keep you shelling out more money for products.
It will remove legal safeguards for internet providers, big pharma will be able to knock generic drugs out of the running and keep prices artificially high, and big media will be able to do the same with small media providers. It’s cronyism and monopolism on a global level, and yet another excuse for a massive, bloated, overpowered supranational bureaucracy. And it’s no surprise the law originated in the United States and Japan.
To be fair, the pharmaceutical industries are most healthy in these two nations, where there is enough of a profit margin to develop new drugs, but where the most intrusive, convoluted, and abusive regulations keep their products from getting to the market in a timely manner. Often European markets see the roll out of these products before the US and Japan ever do, but they are also price fixed — another drain on the profitability of creating medicines. I can see why they are looking to protect themselves, but I would rather see a streamlining of FDA rules and the end of price fixing in other nations. We could see a quicker adoption and recouping of the massive investment it takes to get a drug to market (and that doesn’t touch the hundreds of medicines that either fail or never get through testing.)
Drugs are an interesting problem for intellectual property laws — there is a manifest product that comes out of them; I would think defending a patent on the physical product is more appropriate than to tie it to IP legislation.
This is an infinitely more aggressive and dangerous bit of legislation, and people need to come together to stop it.
