The entertainment industry's efforts to impose U.S.-style DMCA copyright law on the globe (and push ISPs toward being network content nannies) is dubbed the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). As we've previously discussed, the ACTA was constructed largely in secret in negotiations between the entertainment industry and world governments -- and drastically changes safe harbor protections for ISPs by strongly suggesting they boot P2P users from their networks if they'd like to remain safely in said harbor.

While the entertainment industry and the Office Of The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) did their best to keep the full agreement out of the eyes of the public (therefore avoiding any pesky debate), most of the agreement recently wound up leaking out anyway. Now that the agreement is largely finished and leaked, the USTR last Friday disingenuously announced it was finally time to release a full copy in order to "help the process of reaching a final agreement."

This morning the full agreement (pdf) was released. Lawyers and others specifically focused on the copyright debate will of course spend much of the day poring over the 39-page document, though it shouldn't include anything most of them hadn't already seen in leaked versions. We're of course most interested in section 4 (page 18), which discusses the ISPs' new mandated role in copyright enforcement.

Previous leaks of the agreements didn't explicitly mandate carriers employ "three strikes" (booting copyright offenders off the network after three violations) rules --they simply highlighted graduated response as the only real example for ISPs to embrace if they wanted to be protected from legal liability. That three strikes language appears to be gone from this latest version, though ISP legal liability in the agreement is still contingent on ISPs having some kind of "takedown" process (as in, the forwarding of DMCA violation letters) in place.

The agreement also requires that copyright holders be able to "expeditiously obtain from that provider information on the identity of the relevant subscriber" while requiring that countries "promote the development of mutually supportive relationships between online service providers and right holders." Not coincidentally, several of the biggest ISPs (most recently Qwest and Verizon, but also Cox) are already voluntarily threatening users with account termination if they don't stop downloading copyrighted TV episodes and films -- though we've found in several instances the actual threat of disconnection is a bluff.