Great vid on ACTA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Xg_C2YmG0
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Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA
White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was signed by Obama on October 1 2011, yet is currently the subject of a White House petition demanding Senators be forced to ratify the treaty. The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.
The hacktivist group Anonymous attacked and took offline the Federal Trade Commission’s website yesterday in protest against the treaty, which was also the subject of demonstrations across major cities in Poland, a country set to sign the agreement today.
Under the provisions of ACTA, copyright holders will be granted sweeping direct powers to demand ISPs remove material from the Internet on a whim. Whereas ISPs normally are only forced to remove content after a court order, all legal oversight will be abolished, a precedent that will apply globally, rendering the treaty worse in its potential scope for abuse than SOPA or PIPA.
A country known for its enforcement of harsh Internet censorship policies like China could demand under the treaty that an ISP in the United States remove content or terminate a website on its server altogether. As we have seen from the enforcement of similar copyright policies in the US, websites are sometimes targeted for no justifiable reason.
The groups pushing the treaty also want to empower copyright holders with the ability to demand that users who violate intellectual property rights (with no legal process) have their Internet connections terminated, a punishment that could only ever be properly enforced by the creation of an individual Internet ID card for every web user, a system that is already in the works.
“The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes” /Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The treaty will also mandate that ISPs disclose personal user information to the copyright holder, while providing authorities across the globe with broader powers to search laptops and Internet-capable devices at border checkpoints.
In presenting ACTA as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, the Obama administration managed to circumvent the legislative process and avoid having to get Senate approval, a method questioned by Senator Wyden.
“That said, even if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement?” asks TechDirt. “The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the president legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.”.
26 European Union member states along with the EU itself are set to sign the treaty at a ceremony today in Tokyo. Other countries wishing to sign the agreement have until May 2013 to do so.
Critics are urging those concerned about Obama’s decision to sign the document with no legislative oversight to demand the Senate be forced to ratify the treaty.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
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ACTA is worse than SOPA, here’s what you need to know
J. D. Heyes
Natural News
January 29, 2012
As a warrior for Internet freedom, you helped defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA by supporting Web black outs by sites like Wikipedia and by contacting your lawmaker to voice your displeasure. So loud was your voice that even the president of the United Statessided with you in opposing it.
But don’t take a deep sigh of relief because, after all, we’re talking about a merger of Washington, D.C., and Hollywood here, as well as global interests. After the motion picture industry, its subsidiaries and all “interested parties” have spent nearly $150 million lobbying for some sort of Internet-centric “anti-piracy” bill, you should have known the powers that be would return.
And they have, only this time they are pushingsomething far more onerous: ACTA, or theAnti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
“Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines) what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting ‘Internet distribution and information technology’”, says an assessment of ACTA by the watchdogs at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
“ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet [regarding] legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development,” says EFF’s assessment.
As is usually the case with dubious, rights-stripping legislation, ACTA – which Forbes.com reports was signed by the U.S. in 2011 and has already been sanctioned as well by Japan, Switzerland and many European Union nations – has largely been negotiated in the shadows and, thus, has largely been devoid of scrutiny… until now.
While the Obama administration was shying away from SOPA, it has been aggressively pursuing ACTA (full disclosure: the process was started under the Bush administration). Critics say it is much more far-reaching than SOPA, bypassing “the sovereign laws of participating nations” and “forcing ISP’s across the globe to act as internet police,” Forbes said.
But ACTA isn’t limited just to the Internet. In fact, the agreement would crack down things like generic drugs and would make food patents more difficult to obtain “by enforcing a global standard on seed patents that threatens local farmers and food independence across the developed world,” Forbes says.
The good thing is, there is not universal acceptance of ACTA and its onerous, liberty-stealing provisions. Emerging nations like Brazil and India are adamantly opposed to it for rightfully fearing its provisions would harm their economies.
But Internet freedom is also under attack from other quarters as well. The EFF also notes thatthe Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which is a separate measure, would “rewrite the global rules on IP enforcement”.
“All signatory countries will be required to conform their domestic laws and policies to the provisions of the Agreement,” said the EFF assessment. “In the U.S. this is likely to further entrench controversial aspects of U.S. copyright law. The recently leaked U.S. IP chapter also includes provisions that appear to go beyond current U.S. law. This raises significant concerns for citizens’ due process, privacy and freedom of expression rights.”
SOPA may be history but that doesn’t mean Internet freedom does not remain under assault. Tyrants never stop trying to enforce tyranny.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...ht-sopa-was-bad-just-wait-until-you-meet-acta
https://www.eff.org/pages/trans-pacific-partnership-agreement
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngau...ng-controversial-internet-piracy-legislation/
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