Will proposed treaty make border agents copyright cops?

If the treaty is adopted as proposed, such provisions would impose "a strong, top-down enforcement regime, with new cooperation requirements upon internet service providers," including the requirement for them to disclose customer information on request, Wikileaks noted. The proposal also bans "anti-circumvention" measures which may affect online anonymity systems, Wikileaks noted.

Importantly, the treaty -- if adopted as proposed -- also has the potential to turn customs and border patrol agents into copyright cops, said Caleb Sullivan, an attorney specializing in international trade and customs law with Becker & Poliakoff, a US law firm.

US Customs and border patrol officials have already been carrying out searches of laptops and other electronic devices belonging to travelers at US borders without any reasonable cause or suspicion, Sullivan said. If ACTA is adopted, it will give these officials a much broader pretext for carrying out such searches, he cautioned. "If the rules are established within this international treaty it would provide further justification from them to engage in this type of behavior," he continued, "and it won't be just at US borders that travelers could be subjected to such searches, but in other countries as well."

ACTA as proposed will also "create new forms of legal liability for third parties over infringements of others," and it will lower existing standards for secondary liability, warned IP Justice, a US-based civil rights group focused on intellectual property laws. In a white paper posted in response to the ACTA document posted by Wikileaks, IP Justice said that ACTA could end up criminalizing non-commercial copyright infringements and endanger legal due process rights of individuals.

The group also lamented the apparent lack of transparency surrounding ACTA up to this point. "Negotiations are going on in secret between intellectual property industry lobbyists and the trade offices of wealthy countries," the group said in its white paper. "The lack of transparency in the process to negotiate the global trade pact for an information society is concerning," it said.

Responding to a request for comment, a spokeswoman from the USTR pointed to the fact sheet posted by the agency last October. She added that the agency could not comment on the contents of an "allegedly leaked document."

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