If you enjoy Flickr or Ffffound or Youtube, if you like being able to post pretty pictures on your Tumblr or swap photos across blogs, then listen up:
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad.
- That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
- That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
- That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
- Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
I’m not a lawyer so can’t wade through and parse the language precisely. However, knowing that I do about corporate ignorance and knee-jerk over-reaction, and knowing what I do about the federal government generally kowtowing to the worst of the worst of big business’ instincts, I would bet it’s as bad as people believe. Perhaps even worse.
There is some additional information at Michael Geist’s site and at the EFF.
There are also ways to contact your congress people:
Let them know you have an opinion. Let them know the Internet matters to you and they should listen to their constituents, not a group of lawyers from Universal or Disney.
I agree intellectual property needs to be protected. But this is subtle business and should not be decided by a secret agreement being jammed through by business lobbyists and a bunch of fat, aging white dudes who have no concept of how the Internet operates.
