ACTA poses threat to personal freedoms and privacy
Joseph Starkloff
If you search the web for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) you’re likely to find a plethora of information, though half of it is from unreliable sources, but if you watch the local or national news you’re not going to hear a word about it.This is a real shame.
ACTA, which is considered an international treaty, was first drafted in 2006 and has continued to be retooled for the last four years. Its purpose is intended to be a way to protect intellectual property. What is unique about ACTA is that it’s not just designed to protect physical goods, but Internet distribution and technology as well.
The devil is in the details with ACTA. While several nations working on ACTA have been secretive about the treaties wording, a few aspects of it have been revealed.
Wired.com summarized parts of ACTA is expected to “require Internet Service Providers (ISP) to monitor all consumers’ Internet communications.”
There is already an obvious danger in this, but the threat on privacy and personal rights doesn’t stop there.
The ISP is instructed to reveal the identity of an individual who is believed to have infringed on a copyright to the rights holders’. There is no due process. You are guilty without a trail.
The reason for this is ACTA’s treaty status. It sidesteps United States law, even though it would affect those in the United States.
ACTA would also criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing. It’s fair to say that peer-to-peer sharing has been abused over the last ten years, but criminalizing the technology seems a bit extreme.
Do you really want to it to be legal for your ISP to watch your web surfing? How well do you trust them? Do you trust any faceless corporation enough to monitor what you do online?
There has to be a breaking point to the corporate greed. A corporation needs to guard their copyrights to stay profitable, but spying on the consumer is not the way to do this. Make harsher penalties for those who steal protected material, but don’t create a system than becomes “big brother.”
This is a real threat to personal freedom. There should never even be a consideration in any treaty or rule to allow corporate voyeurism, let alone override US laws. During all of this, the mainstream media spends hours reporting on Tiger Wood’s divorce and Lindsay Lohan’s release from jail, but virtually nothing on this.
