You know what they call SOPA in France? They call it a royale with cheese  ACTA! You know why they call it ACTA? Because they have the metric system!! Ok, that didn’t make any sense, but to be fair, neither does ACTA.
Yes, Folks, if you were celebrating that SOPA did not pass this week and you thought that was it for that idea, I am going to have to piss on your parade. Partly because I had a bit too much beer but mostly because it’s not over. A new law called ACTA is now being considered in Europe and could possibly spell the end for the Internet as Europeans we know it. Hit the break to read more about ACTA.

If you thought the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act were scary, imagine this: There is an international treaty with the same goals and civil rights infringements as its American cousins, crafted in secrecy outside any existing trade organization with the help of industry giants such as the Motion Picture Association of America.

The treaty’s goal is to ban counterfeit goods and online piracy by requiring Internet Protocol servers and individual websites to monitor and prosecute suspected copyright infringements. But the goal comes packaged with some collateral damage: infringements on individual’s civil rights and the creation of a system responsible for widespread, international online censorship.

This nightmare treaty is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It has most of the same goals, supporters and privacy abuses of SOPA and PIPA. What it didn’t have was the kind of public outcry led by websites such as Reddit and Wikipedia when it was signed by the U.S. The treaty now awaits ratification by the European Union before it goes into full force.

ACTA’s scope is far wider than SOPA or PIPA. It aims to stop the “proliferation of counterfeit and pirated goods, as well as of services that share infringing material.” This includes knockoff Louis Vuitton purses and cheap counterfeit medicine in developing nations. It also means any website or program that could potentially be used to infringe copyrighted material, from sites with links for music downloads to music-burning software, would be automatically outlawed.

So yeah, the  intentions are kinda good with this one because, after all, no one wants to get poisoned with counterfeit medicine, but on the other hand, you know what they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Visit thedailyaztec.com  to read the entire article while I wonder why they depicted the Internet as a little girl in the illustration above. In my humble opinion, the Internet is more like an obscene-looking guy wearing a trench coat.

ACTA has same dangers as PIPA and SOPA

Or visit stopacta.info to learn more about how to stop it.

Image courtesy of Google Image Search.