ACTA: why I'm keeping my name on the petition

An interesting discussion developed on my blog-post last Friday, which I feel duty-bound to share again since it made me change my views on a couple of points. Logic beats logic, and since I realized that my analysis had overseen issues which can make a big difference, I will not hesitate to admit that I was wrong, and that in reality ACTA does leave an element of vagueness without proper safeguards which makes it worrying, though a far cry from the "death of the internet as we know it" propagated in some media. Apart from that, the most worrying part is that the Committee established by the treaty gives unto itself the power to amend its rules and procedures after ratification (Articles 36.4 and 36.6). This point on its own already creates a big loop-hole in the agreement.

The other point concerns free software. I will quote my friend Andrea on this point:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published "Speak out against ACTA", stating that the ACTA threatens free software by creating a culture "in which the freedom that is required to produce free software is seen as dangerous and threatening rather than creative, innovative, and exciting." ACTA would also require that existing ISPs no longer host free software that can access copyrighted media; this would substantially affect many sites that offer free software or host software projects such as SourceForge. Specifically, the FSF argues that ACTA will make it more difficult and expensive to distribute free software via file sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent, which are currently used to distribute large amounts of free software. The FSF also argues that ACTA will make it harder for users of free operating systems to play non-free media because DRM protected media would not be legally playable with free software.

So my revised conclusion is that even if most parts of ACTA seem to be written in good intentions, the transposition of the current strict copyright laws into the digital domain need to be done in a more global discussion incorporating intellectual property rights in the internet world. Until this is done with proper safeguards, I think that we'd be better off without ACTA than with it.

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Mark Anthony Sammut

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