Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) aims to establish new global standards for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) to effectively combat the increasing prevalent of counterfeit and pirated goods. The ACTA seeks to focus on 3 areas: a) increasing international cooperation, b) establishing best practices for enforcement, and c) providing a more effective legal framework to combat counterfeiting and piracy which cover the areas generic medicines, as well as piracy over the Internet.

 

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) proposed between the EU, the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Switzerland seeks to widen the scope of protection and sets higher standards for enforcement of intellectual property rights, extending beyond the provisions of the existing multilateral TRIPS Agreement. The Agreement proposes technical assistance and capacity building measures in favour of developing countries, which is indicative of possible pressure being applied on developing countries to exceed to ACTA.

 

As regard India, the stringent norms being proposed via ACTA will extend to import, export, in-transit and other situations where goods shall be under customs supervision. This means that the problem of seizure being currently faced by Indian generic drug exporters to Latin America and Africa at European airports may only get compounded as the proposed agreement covers all products at large number of countries. Stakeholders in India are worried since implication of ACTA coming to force may affect them adversely. In view of the large number of exports in the medicine and the IT sectors talks are around for India to collaborate with other developing countries in order to prevent the agreement from being imposed upon them.