More on ACTA
Jan. 27th, 2012 01:47 pmThe EU signed up to ACTA - but it still has to be ratified by the European Parliament, so this is not final. The most useful thing citizens of the EU who oppose the bill can do is probably to write to their MEP: handy article here.
In an interesting development, the 'rapporteur' (official appointed to oversee an issue) responsible has resigned in disgust.
Why you should be concerned about ACTA: the more accurate version, substantially taken from this petition, emended by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
legionseagle, who knows far more about these things than me:
ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small "club" of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). These countries, typically, are net exporters rather than net importers of intellectual property.
Negotiated behind closed doors, with major industry participants such as MPAA and RIAA invited to make submissions instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and established relevant international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries. ACTA would require signatory states to impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online.
It's problematic for all the reasons we went through during the SOPA debacle - you don't have to be in favour of commercial piracy (you don't have to be involved in fandom, either, although I am) to see that this is repressive and will endanger sites which now promote free expression of all kinds of opinion, and has been negotiated in a profoundly undemocratic way.
You can read more on the background at the useful wikipedia article; the pages I linked to at techdirt also seem well-informed.
In an interesting development, the 'rapporteur' (official appointed to oversee an issue) responsible has resigned in disgust.
Why you should be concerned about ACTA: the more accurate version, substantially taken from this petition, emended by
legionseagle, who knows far more about these things than me:ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small "club" of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). These countries, typically, are net exporters rather than net importers of intellectual property.
Negotiated behind closed doors, with major industry participants such as MPAA and RIAA invited to make submissions instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and established relevant international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries. ACTA would require signatory states to impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online.
It's problematic for all the reasons we went through during the SOPA debacle - you don't have to be in favour of commercial piracy (you don't have to be involved in fandom, either, although I am) to see that this is repressive and will endanger sites which now promote free expression of all kinds of opinion, and has been negotiated in a profoundly undemocratic way.
You can read more on the background at the useful wikipedia article; the pages I linked to at techdirt also seem well-informed.