Wednesday, November 04, 2009

As bad as the ISA: ACTA turns everyone into pirates, including ISPs and you're mom.

I'm late to the bandwagon, but the ACTA discussions have already started. The ACTA is a hugely important act being discussed right now, at this moment, behind closed doors in Seoul, South Korea. Discussions are ongoing and will last the week, I presume. Details have been kept under lock and key, but some of the points have surfaced online.

It's not looking very good.

From Boing Boing:


* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.



From TorrentFreak:


* Similarly, all participating countries have to adopt a ‘notice and takedown’ policy where copyright holders can request ISPs to remove infringing materials, again without having to provide solid evidence or proof that they actually own the copyrights. When ISPs don’t comply with the requests they will be held liable, which means that they will be seen as pirates themselves.

This goes further beyond free music and videos. This affects each and every one of us if it's passed. Anyone "accused" of infringing copyright could have their internet service revoked. Keyword: accused. As in, "however we see fit".

This is as bad as Malaysia's ISA. Spread the word people. The fight continues.

Futher Links:
Slashdot
Michael Geist(who originally reported on this)
ReadWriteWeb

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