ACTA (EU) bigger brother SOPA (USA)
Is the world getting better or worse? News about SOPA and later ACTA has done nothing to clear up our confusion.
Last week, hundreds of major websites in the US - including WordPress, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, Craigslist and Reddit - protested the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill and its sister Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). The protests, which included petitions and letters to politicians, succeeded in swaying the White House to withdraw support for the controversial bills.
"How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet service providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait -- I thought it was innocent until proven guilty…oh…that was ‘before' the NDAA.
"Source: ‘The Internet: The Last Bastion of Free Speech'"
In 2010, the USA government shut down 73,000 websites in exactly this manner. Though the owners of the majority of the targeted sites were not technically infringing copyrights, some were linking to other sites that did, making them accessories.Even more alarming is the ability, under legislation such as SOPA, of the government to control the flow of information across major Internet providers. Articles or videos criticizing political figures or policies could easily be targeted, as they were in October of this year, when the government moved to shut down rogue publishers of critical content .
What it boils down to is that SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing. Alternative news and "extremist" information were the targets (and still are). On other side, one of the reasons ACTA is arousing suspicion and concern is so little is actually known about it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warns that the kind of filtering methods ACTA may usher in may include deep packet inspection of citizens' internet communications, raising considerable concerns for civil liberties, privacy rights and internet innovation.
Boris
Posted at 11:27AM jan 17, 2012 by Boris in Generalno |