Leaked ACTA Draft Treaty Reveals Plans for Net Clampdown

Leaked ACTA Draft Treaty Reveals Plans for Net Clampdown

www.pcworld.com

The U.S., Europe and other countries are secretly drawing up rules designed to crack down on copyright abuse on the Internet, in part by making ISPs liable for illegal content, according to a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement that was seen by the IDG News Service.

It is the latest in a series of leaks from the anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) talks that have been going on for the past two years. Other leaks over the past three months have consisted of confidential internal memos about the negotiations between European lawmakers.

The chapter on the Internet from the draft treaty was shown to the IDG News Service by a source close to people directly involved in the talks, who asked to remain anonymous. Although it was drawn up last October, it is the most recent negotiating text available, according to the source.

It proposes making ISPs (Internet service providers) liable under civil law for the content their subscribers upload or download using their networks.

To avoid being sued by a record company or Hollywood studio for illegally distributing copyright-protected content, the ISP would have to prove that it took action to prevent the copyright abuse, according to the text, and in a footnote gives an example of the sort of policy ISPs would need to adopt to avoid being sued by content owners:

"An example of such a policy is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider's system or network of repeat offenders," the text states.

Terminating someone's subscription is the graduated response enacted in France last year that sparked widespread controversy. The French law is dubbed the "Three Strikes" law because French ISPs must give repeat file sharers two warnings before cutting off their connection.

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[edit on 26-2-2010 by DarkspARCS]

WOW!

I think all here can agree that the taxation of the internet was a sunny day at the beach compared to this law!

If you somehow are implicated as using copyrighted materials - WHAMO! down goes your domain and SLAP! in your pocket the PTB goes...

And I didn't mention anything about the amount of monitoring that is going to be involved... did I?

Guess we can take this one to the toilet and read up on it while trying to figure out how many violations of our rights and Freedoms this will bring!

Think I'll see what the ACLU has to say about this.

www.pcworld.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I don't think TPTB realised what an impact the internet would have on the world and our abilities to use it to pick up on what they are doing.

Now that the internet geine is out of the bottle they are trying desperetly trying to stuff it back in.

It will start with saying its for copyright reasons and the line will slowly but surley move to cut off bloggers, remove old news stories that paint them in a bad light or just anything that they feel is a threat to there power.

The good thing is that wireless is getting to the point that it would be easy to pick up on a connection in any major city and use the net anonymously.

There are also a huge amount of smart and motivated people using the net they will help provide programmes to help us use the net without being traced or making it muh harder to do.

If this goes through 1984 just took a step closer to being real

This is the year of endings, so maybe there won't even be an internet soon, but if that is the case then maybe the PTB might find themselves in the abyss as prophesised by St.John and the rest of us will be too busy re-building the world for a better future.

The more they try to control and limit the existence of other human beings, the closer we come to a mass breakout.