WHAT IS ACTA?
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a plurilateral agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. The agreement aims to establish an international legal framework for targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet, and would create a new governing body outside existing forums, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, or the United Nations.
**BELOW ARE VERY STRONG OPINIONS**
HOLD UP! IS THAT A BEATLES SONG THAT YOU'VE CAUGHT IN YOUR BIRTHDAY PARTY CLIP?
That's five years in jail please.
Wait- what? What do you mean that I have to be imprisoned? What's wrong with playing the Beatles in the background? Everyone's shared clips with copyrighted music on it before!
Recently, most of the EU, Asia and the US has signed a threatening treaty, ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). This treaty has not yet been voted, but will soon be passed to the government on June 2012. Like SOPA/PIPA, sharing copyrighted files will be illegalised.
The intentions may sound good as these huge media companies have been fighting for protecting their copyrights for decades, but what would this mean to our freedom of speech and creativity online?
This will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
And that isn't the worst bit. The news groups and media worldwide are hiding this from us, and this treaty is being discussed behind our backs. They don't want us, free citizens, to know about it and to rouse debate and chaos.
This isn't a joke, this is really happening RIGHT NOW. In fact, the UK has signed the treaty only last week. You may or may not have heard of the mass protests of 30,000 people that had been happening in Poland.
This not only affects file sharing and rights to creativity and innovation, something us citizens prize so much in modern day Internet, but it also affects the growth of certain medication. It will stop the production of counterfeit drugs, but this could also mean drugs that people desperately need.
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Things on a social media site like Facebook have to be taken as opinion, sometimes highly emotionally charged opinion at that.
ACTA being negotiated in secret hardly helps in this respect. We are now working with the Open Rights Group on this so we intent the blog to have information about ACTA that has been checked for accuracy and kept up to date. Quality not quantity!
What has to be remembered is that ACTA is only a treaty. The treaty is the excuse for national governments to enact their own laws, which could well be ACTA plus some nasty twists of their own.
If we can send the parts of ACTA that do not deal with actual physical goods packing while at a world wide level we can do so as a united coalition. Once the fight moves to how individual countries implement ACTA into national law the effort it will take to prevent the damage will be so much greater. Some states may loose the fight in which case their experience of the Internet will change profoundly for the worse.
WHY FIGHT?
Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_bERAf5KAg
Sites:
http://www.stopacta.info/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/01/thought-sopa-was-bad-10-reason.php
Petitions:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet_spread/
https://www.accessnow.org/page/s/just-say-no-to-acta
https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20685
http://www.petitiononline.com/petitions/stopacta/signatures
http://stopacta.org/
http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.campaign.id=6538
