We Are Designed to Party

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ACTA in a Nutshell –

What is ACTA?  ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A new intellectual property enforcement treaty being negotiated by the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan, with Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada recently announcing that they will join in as well.

Why should you care about ACTA? Initial reports indicate that the treaty will have a very broad scope and will involve new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology.”

What is the goal of ACTA? Reportedly the goal is to create new legal standards of intellectual property enforcement, as well as increased international cooperation, an example of which would be an increase in information sharing between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies.

Essential ACTA Resources - 

• Read more about ACTA here: ACTA Fact Sheet
• Read the authentic version of the ACTA text as of 15 April 2011, as finalized by participating countries here: ACTA Finalized Text
• Follow the history of the treaty’s formation here: ACTA history
• Read letters from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wherein he challenges the constitutionality of ACTA: Letter 1 | Letter 2 | Read the Administration’s Response to Wyden’s First Letter here: Response
• Watch a short informative video on ACTA: ACTA Video
• Watch a lulzy video on ACTA: Lulzy Video

Say NO to ACTA. It is essential to spread awareness and get the word out on ACTA.

COME ON HOW DOES THIS HAVE SO LITTLE NOTES?

WAKE UUUUUPPPP

We went to the mat for you with regard to SOPA, wake the hell up.

Signal boost.

As an addition to posts going around that inform people about the fucked-up-ed-ness of intellectual property technology laws, I’d like to heartily suggest the book Content by Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow, helpfully, licenses all of his books under Creative Commons, and puts them on his website for download. This link here is to download the book Content (in any format you want). It’s a collection of articles he’s written for internet and print media, as well as speeches and presentations from conferences and speaking engagements for major companies.

Cory Doctorow is brilliantly eloquent at articulating why the current ‘issue’ of the internet making it difficult for companies to control their copyrights isn’t reason for the technology to be made illegal. His work shows that internet file-sharing isn’t fundamentally different from when VCR, the radio, or even player pianos first came into being. Each of these technologies allowed user control of the ways in which consumers accessed copyrighted content, and each were viciously fought against by the controllers of those copyrights. 

The internet is the player piano of modern media. We don’t need to hack that player piano to pieces, we need to reinvent the ways we license art to keep up with it - because it can’t be uninvented, and making a tool less good at what it does goes against human nature. People want art, art wants to be enjoyed, and artists need to be paid. That’s all possible. 

But totalitarian control of the internet isn’t going to make that happen.