“ACTA” along with “HR.1981” are The NEXT threat after SOPA PIPA will be the bigger than these two.
6:04 PM Edit This 0 Comments »
Very Very rare people are aware of the word ACTA.ACTA is the abbreviation for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA is an international agreement to establish new standards on enforcing intellectual property rights. ACTA would create a separate governing body outside of existing international organizations, including WTO (World Trade Organization), WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), EU (European Union) and the UN (United Nations).
Though the bulk of the negotiations and resulting documents have been kept secret with virtually no transparency, it is clear from both the leaked and released statements and documents that ACTA has the potential to infringe upon privacy, civil liberties, legitimate commerce, innovation and freedom on the internet.
Currently Australia, The Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, United States of America, The European Union, Switzerland and Japan are the countries involved in the negotiations.
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). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.
ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet companies. In the name of trademarks and patents, it would also hamper access to generic medicines in poor countries.
Threats to freedom and fundamental human rights
Some points about ACTA
1> ACTA spans virtually all of the developed world, threatening the freedom of the internet as well as access to medication and food. The threat is every bit as real for those countries not involved in the process as the signatories themselves.
2> ACTA has already been signed by many countries including the US, but requires ratification in the EU parliament and the US Senate.
3> The entire monstrosity has been negotiated behind closed doors and kept secret from the public. Technocrats, beholden to the deep pockets of the entertainment lobby, have masked the agreement behind the misnomer of “anti-counterfeiting” when in fact it goes much, much further.
An open letter signed by many organizations, including Consumers International, EDRi (27 European civil rights and privacy NGOs), the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ASIC (French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI), states that "the current draft of ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy."[70] The Free Software Foundation argues that ACTA will create a culture of surveillance and suspicion.[10] Aaron Shaw, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society atHarvard University, argues that "ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties. Even though the precise terms of ACTA remain undecided, the negotiants' preliminary documents reveal many troubling aspects of the proposed agreement" such as removing "legal safeguards that protect Internet Service Providers from liability for the actions of their subscribers" in effect giving ISPs no option but to comply with privacy invasions. Shaw further says that "[ACTA] would also facilitate privacy violations by trademark and copyright holders against private citizens suspected of infringement activities without any sort of legal due process".[71]
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published "Speak out against ACTA", stating that the ACTA threatens free software by creating a culture "in which the freedom that is required to produce free software is seen as dangerous and threatening rather than creative, innovative, and exciting."[10] ACTA would also require that existing ISPs no longer host free software that can access copyrighted media; this would substantially affect many sites that offer free software or host software projects such as SourceForge. Specifically, the FSF argues that ACTA will make it more difficult and expensive to distribute free software via file sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent, which are currently used to distribute large amounts of free software. The FSF also argues that ACTA will make it harder for users of free operating systems to play non-free media because DRM protected media would not be legally playable with free software.[10]
On 10 March 2010, the European Parliament adopted a resolution[72] criticizing the ACTA with 663 in favor of the resolution and 13 against, arguing that "in order to respect fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy" certain changes in the ACTA content and the process should be made.[72]
The European Parliament now has an ultimate opportunity to reject ACTA.
Though ACTA has been developed by the same ill mentality people who brought SOPA PIPA behind the close doors by lobbying the Government officials by keeping the public completely blind of it.thanks to several hackers online including WIKILEAKS, ANONYMOUS with search engines like GOOGLE.this news has reached to the masses finally after this SOPA PIPA massacre.
“Pushed by the same extremist lobbies as PIPA and SOPA in the United States, ACTA is a global initiative aimed at protecting rent-seeking industries who dominate the world economy. The draft opinion report presented by Mr. Zahradil in DEVE committee overlooks all the crucial issues of ACTA: its lack of democratic legitimacy, the outdated vision of international trade it tries to promote, the impact it will have on access to medicines in developing countries, but also on online free speech and innovation worldwide. Starting with the development committee, Members of the EU Parliament must take on these various issues, and reject this infamous agreement once and for all. Citizens must take action to make sure that the EU Parliament gets the word.”, said Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net.
Even now the researches has shown that the whole ACTA procedure is violating the fundamental HUMAN RIGHTS.several activists over the whole world is protesting against it.
If sources are correct then it is the new fascism coming from European Union.if this act gets signed by all the major European countries then America will again start pledging their government for SOPA PIPA and rest assured India will soon imply this if it wants the grants of monet from several European American Asian and African (ARAB countries specially) countries.because all of these countries have already installed or on the verge of installing such ban on cyberspaces.
Now to add the petrol to this already burning fire USA introduced “HR.1981” act.it reads like - “A commercial provider of an electronic communication service shall retain for a period of at least one year a log of the temporarily assigned network addresses the provider assigns to a subscriber to or customer of such service that enables the identification of the corresponding customer or subscriber information under subsection (c)(2) of this section.”
But the truth is that it gives your telephone provider and data provider (ISP) to mandatory record all your records and keep them for 1 year.so the freedom of LIFE is not at stakes here.
Every single one of your actions online will be monitored, whether there is just cause for doing so. The very act of obtaining an IP address will serve as just cause.
What can you do? Fortunately, protests against H.R. 1981 have gathered some steam in the past few days. Unfortunately, it’s almost too late — the bill has been set on the Union Calendar and is now being given expedited consideration. Yes, that means that it could pass Congress and be signed into law quite soon.
The combined Internet movement against SOPA and PIPA are admirable, but each of these is simply a skirmish in a greater war. ACTA is especially concerning because it’s being done behind our backs, without a truly effective way to track the actions. At any rate, it’s not time to mobilize again, rather it’s time to keep the energy that we started with SOPA and PIPA and focus them on these two upcoming threats.
Long Live the Mutiny.
Long Live the Freedom.
Thank You
© Ramen Mukherjee
Source
http://www.laquadrature.net/ACTA
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/after-sopapipa-in-the-us-acta-makes-its-way-to-the-eu-parliament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
0 comments:
Post a Comment