Anti ACTA – Guy Fawkes in Berlin

Last weekend several thousand people (including many Guy Fawkes) protested against ACTA not just in Berlin. Of course I joined the demonstration in my city due to the fact that ACTA violates my opinion about how internet culture should work…

Anti ACTA means Pro Internet

Since Spring 2007, 39 countries (27 member states of the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia, México as well as a few other countries) negotiated in secret a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods: ACTA. Leaked documents show that one of the major goal of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of strong criminal sanctions.

ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet negotiated by a small “club” of like-minded countries. Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.

At a time when important debates are taking place on the need to adapt copyright to the digital age, this treaty would bypass democratic processes in order to enforce a fundamentally irrelevant regulatory regime. It would profoundly alter the very nature of the Internet as we know it by by putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers, ACTA will give the music and movie industries a legal weapon to force ISPs to police their networks and users themselves. (via stopacta.info)