Difference between revisions of "2012"

1. Was created in secrecy and kept opaque, despite many requests for release. This violates the principle of an open and transparent democracy.
2. Advocates censorship on the internet and attempts to quash the concept of free media and information.
3. Makes it illegal to link to any site that breaches copyright law, making it nearly impossible to maintain openly editable sites such as Wikipedia or this wiki.
4. Holds ISPs to ransom by imposing severe financial and legal penalties if their customers break copyright law.
5. Forces ISPs to violate the privacy of their customers and store logs of their online activity, without warrant or probable cause - tantamount to online wiretapping.
6. Uses vague language which can be twisted to serve the agendas of individual cases.
7. Puts control of such measures into a single "ACTA committee", which has the power to make legal decisions without vote or consultation of member states.
8. Allows the ACTA committee to modify the bill as they please, without vote. Essentially hands them a blank cheque with which they can write their own laws.
9. Does not impose any real regulation on sanctions, penalties or legal decisions. This makes the system open to corruption.
10. Stifles creativity and innovation using scare tactics, maintaining a status quo of large organisations that control particular markets.

This affects linux-mips.org's wiki directly which is why a normally purely technical, unpolitical site like linux-mips.org has such a call for action. Act now: act-on-acta.eu, Act Against ACTA on Facebook, How to act against ACTA, more that YOU can do.

Here's a law processor Michael Geist's rant about ACTA, an analysis of Acta.