The ACTA is a treaty drafted in secret which is being negotiated between most of the world’s countries and which, among other things, proposes certain agreements between governments regarding the Internet.
I suggest you read this BoingBoing summary of the Internet section of ACTA.
Did you read it? No? Go ahead, click that link. I’ll wait.
Alright, you’ve read it. Surely you’ll agree, this is A Bad Thing(tm). There is no possible scenario in which this treaty can have a good effect on the Internet.
Please everyone, write your House Reps and Senators and demand that this be examined by professionals who actually know what they’re doing. That way it can be destroyed before it’s ever agreed on by governments.
Wow. What troubles me even more is that the negotiations are secret. So much for transparency in government, a.k.a. democracy, which could be considered the root cause of problems like this.
Any idea where one could find the actual text? I can’t seem to find any other stories about the leaked text.
Here’s a petition about the transparency issue:
http://www.keionline.org/acta-petition
Several Freedom of Information Act requests have already been denied on the grounds of “national security”. This leak was a word-of-mouth leak only; apparently the document was watermarked such that even a manually typed transcription would be traceable to its source (particular phrases, misspellings, etc).
The biggest problem is that treaties become Constitutional law, thanks to the Constitution itself. I guess it doesn’t matter if the treaty itself should be unconstitutional?