Hello, if you are a member and/or visitor of any social networking site, blog, or any website in general.... and you happen to be reading this message, i would like you to please devote the next few minutes of your time to what i am about to tell you. a great threat is on the horizon for our internet, one so potentially great that it will negatively effect our web for the worse, and ruin the precious freedoms we enjoy from nowhere else but the web. what am i referring to you ask? well, to put it as simply as possible...
there is a international copyright treaty being proposed and set up in secret, that will end our free internet as we know it. this treaty does a handful of horrible things...
first off, this will impose a "three strikes and your out" type of policy. where if you were to merely get "accused" three times of copyright infringement from anybody regarding anything, you and everybody using your IP would have their internet service shut off forever...
secondly, this would force ISP's around the globe to police and monitor the web at their own legal liability. so they would have to break net neutrality by spying upon their customers internet usage. and since most websites are user-generated based, ISP's would not be able to keep up with monitoring the mountains of data uploaded daily to sites like youtube, facebook, rapidshare, twitter, etc etc....even independent blogs! so the outcome of this would be the ISP's blocking most user-generated content based sites to their customers, to save their own necks. and if not that then they would most certainly be censored and/or shut down by governments and entertainment lobbyist organizations.
finally, this treaty would give police new powers to be able to confiscate your electronic devices at state and national borders, without your consent or a warrant. and if they were to find any copyrighted content on your device they could do whatever with it, and send you the bill for copyright infringement! one last thing, this treaty would also enforce mandatory punishments on breaking electronic content's DRM, regardless of the excuse.
now this evil treaty is known by the name of ACTA, or "Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement". and for the sake of our precious free internet, it must be stopped. the internet is arguably the most amazing, wonderful, invention man has come up with in modern times. dont let these greedy bastards ruin it....
here is a link to a news article that you can use to read up on acta and inform your friends & family;
http://boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/policy-laundering/
and here is the official leaked document of the current version of ACTA,
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/11/actadoc1.pdf
along with a wiki page for the most up to date news regarding its progress...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
EDIT: Fixed the URLs.
there is a international copyright treaty being proposed and set up in secret, that will end our free internet as we know it. this treaty does a handful of horrible things...
first off, this will impose a "three strikes and your out" type of policy. where if you were to merely get "accused" three times of copyright infringement from anybody regarding anything, you and everybody using your IP would have their internet service shut off forever...
secondly, this would force ISP's around the globe to police and monitor the web at their own legal liability. so they would have to break net neutrality by spying upon their customers internet usage. and since most websites are user-generated based, ISP's would not be able to keep up with monitoring the mountains of data uploaded daily to sites like youtube, facebook, rapidshare, twitter, etc etc....even independent blogs! so the outcome of this would be the ISP's blocking most user-generated content based sites to their customers, to save their own necks. and if not that then they would most certainly be censored and/or shut down by governments and entertainment lobbyist organizations.
finally, this treaty would give police new powers to be able to confiscate your electronic devices at state and national borders, without your consent or a warrant. and if they were to find any copyrighted content on your device they could do whatever with it, and send you the bill for copyright infringement! one last thing, this treaty would also enforce mandatory punishments on breaking electronic content's DRM, regardless of the excuse.
now this evil treaty is known by the name of ACTA, or "Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement". and for the sake of our precious free internet, it must be stopped. the internet is arguably the most amazing, wonderful, invention man has come up with in modern times. dont let these greedy bastards ruin it....
here is a link to a news article that you can use to read up on acta and inform your friends & family;
http://boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/policy-laundering/
and here is the official leaked document of the current version of ACTA,
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/11/actadoc1.pdf
along with a wiki page for the most up to date news regarding its progress...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
EDIT: Fixed the URLs.