Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

Last month, the European Parliament voted by 633-13 to demand release of the text of ACTA, the "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement", which both the current and previous US Presidential administrations have tried to keep secret "lest the public oppose its passage".  Last year, the Obama administration went so far as to declare, via Presidential executive order, the ludicrous claim that allowing the text of the proposed agreement to become public would "do damage to the national security".

Well, apparently our "historically open" administration finally caved at the eighth round of treaty negotiations in Wellington, New Zealand last week. A current draft version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was posted on the main EU web site today (PDF document).  As C|Net puts it, "In general, ACTA's proposals seek to export controversial chunks of U.S. copyright law to the rest of the world."

Naturally, I'm sure that not one of us can possibly guess which US commercial interests are behind this.

In related reading, Molly Wood reports that the GAO released a report last week on counterfeiting and piracy in the US.  While the report concluded that consumers and businesses do suffer adverse effects from counterfeit goods, it also concluded that most estimates of the economic impact of counterfeiting and piracy "are either totally made up or are simply wild assumptions".  In particular, the FBI was unable to produce "any proof, methodology, or source data" to back up a report claiming $250 billion lost by American corporations to piracy in 2002, nor could the Business Software Alliance produce any evidence to substantiate an allegation of $9 billion lost to piracy in 2008.  These seem in keeping with the manner in which it has been widely alleged that the RIAA and MPAA calculate their piracy losses:  They make a (probably wildly optimistic) marketing prediction before the fact of how many copies of a particular product they expect to sell, subtract actual sales once it hits the market, and then declare that the difference between the two simply must be due to piracy — because after all, they know that they're all creative geniuses, and it simply isn't possible that hardly anybody bought the product because it sucks.

Update:

randwolf kindly pointed me at this analysis of the ACTA text from University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist.  The analysis makes it much clearer than the legalese of the treaty itself that, just as previously believed, ACTA is really very specifically targeted at digital media that can be copied and downloaded, to the detriment of any fair-use rights with regard to any such material.  It would not be too great an exaggeration to say that this is about extending the reach of the MPAA, RIAA and Business Software Alliance world-wide (at least partly via an end-run around the World Intellectual Property Organization).