International

The SP will vote to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) when it comes before the European Parliament in the near future. Recently concluded behind closed doors, the treaty’s aim is to improve protection of intellectual property rights and has already been signed by a number of parties, including the US and Japan.

Explaining the SP’s opposition to ACTA, Euro-MP Dennis de Jong says: “It does not provide a good balance between on the one hand the economic interests that go along with intellectual property rights and on the other the public interest.”

ACTA will make, for example, the production of generic medicines – life-saving drugs for the large groups of people who are unable to pay the market price for branded versions – almost impossible. Internet users will, in the SP’s view, be far too readily criminalised. You will soon be vulnerable to criminal prosecution for, to take an example, putting film clips or sound fragments on the Internet. “The corporate lobby and authors’ rights organisations are being given far too much of their own way in this,” says De Jong.