http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

Read it. Understand it? If you own any form of digital media that you haven't purchased you can be fined and have your items confiscated at border controls such as airports. Now, many of you will think this is fair, preventing stealing (lets not get into the details of whether it truly counts as stealing right now). Many of you however, may use p2p sites and be severely affected. BOTH parties will be screwed over though - how will they tell the difference between pirated music and legitimately acquired music? Either on this premise ACTA will fall flat on its face, or we will see the rise of forced use of DRM encoded files (look it up, see the injustice of being restricted in its use). So yeah, we have a problem already.

It doesn't stop there.

ISPs will be legally required to give out your browsing habits to the organization upon demand, showing a gross disregard to end user privacy. Not very nice is it? Oh, and don't think you'll get around it with a proxy. Those will be illegal. As will anonymous posting on forums - no privacy, ever.

With this proposed agreement (which at time of writing, isn't confirmed to have passed or failed. Yet) we move one step closer to a Big Brother state. Except in this case it's not the state. IT'S FREAKING GLOBAL. The internet, the only truly anarchic system that works, will be monitored, regulated and controlled by an organization serving corporations such as the RIAA, unanswerable to any other authoritative body.

And there's not much we can do, except hope it fails.


This is a hugely important issue. It will affect our modern culture drastically. Don't think it won't. Don't think it's not serious.

The internet is [bad word removed]ed.
Click here to launch article