The Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA was negotiated between 2008-2010. It was put to the European Parliament in 2012, and was rejected. But what was it? And why was it so controversial?

It was an attempt to create a trade agreement around a specific issue area of intellectual property rights. It was led by the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the EU and Japan. One of the key aims of its proponents was to establish in international trade law, a set of measures to address copyright enforcement online. To that extent it incorporated a chapter on enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet, including copyright and trade marks. This chapter is what grabbed the attention of lawyers, academics and activists around the world. There were two main areas of conflict. One of them was copyright enforcement, which at that time entailed the so-called "3-strikes" measures ( see my section on France) and which is covered extensively here in my posts on ACTA. The other issue was access to medicine ( which I do not cover).

If you like the articles in this section and you are interested in ACTA and copyright enforcement policy, you may like my book A Copyright Masquerade: How Corporate Lobbying Threatens Online Freedoms which discusses ACTA in detail. You may also like The Copyright Enforcement Enigma - Internet Politics and the 'Telecoms Package'

And you may like my book The Closing of the Net which discusses the issue of secondary liability in the context of the UK copyright blocking judgments and the Megaupload case in New Zealand.