Here at Scoop44, we’re all about being the voice of today’s youth. We’re down with you in a hip-hop kind of way, as Michael Steele might say. Still, some issues seem kind of hard to, you know, youth up. For instance, you’d think that the Obama administration rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request about a trade agreement on national security grounds would not be of interest to most of the YouTube generation. As a matter of fact, you’d be wrong. This pending trade agreement — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA — concerns several matters near and dear to the hearts of most millennials. It could put your very iPod at risk.

According to a leaked document on Wikileaks (a .pdf of which is available here), a possible version of the still-unratified treaty would give customs authorities the right to “suspend import, export, and trans-shipment of suspected IPR [intellectual property rights] infringing goods.” This, among other leaked provisions of a possible version of the treaty, seem to show that “the proposed trade accord would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications,” according to Wired.

You read that right: if this version of the trade agreement is ratified, your iPod could be searched at an airport — and if you have any material on it that has been downloaded illegally, it could be confiscated.

Now, no one knows if, in fact, the agreement will end up with provisions like this in it. The entire negotiating process is being done in secret — and thanks to the Obama administration, it’s going to stay secret. This doesn’t bode well for the final product. As it stands, the treaty is being heavily lobbied by entertainment industries, as Wikileaks notes, who have a stake in making sure IPR protection is as strong as possible. 

This is not in the interest of the general public though, and certainly not in the interest of my generation. While I understand that the profits from pirating IPR-protected material often goes towards organized crime, it’s laughable to think that this is the case in the online distribution of movies and music, which are usually free. Most people with an mp3 player become music “pirates” at some point; a recent academic survey in the UK found that the average teenager’s iPod had over 800 illegally-obtained tracks on it. 

Is this selfish? Perhaps. But it also is a crime practiced by 61 percent of the teenage population that is incredibly unlikely to cease. The internet is an adaptable place, and while laws may force file-sharing technology to change, the practice itself, in all likelihood, will continue at a high rate. Any regulation that could ever seriously stem the flow of illegal file-sharing —  such as ACTA — would be too much of an infringement on civil liberties to be valuable to society at large. It’s simply not worth criminalizing this behavior to such an extreme extent. 

Now, the Obama administration might not be doing this. Perhaps the trade agreement is undergoing significant changes. As long as the negotiating process remains secret, however, this isn’t something we can know. This complete lack of transparency is a disappointment in itself.

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