by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
ACTA is the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” and it is being hatched out in secret and is hence twice as dangerous.
Most parliamentarians and governments involved in this seem to be scared to put this before their parliaments and rather do their deals behind closed doors.
Details, with the exception of a few leaks, are entirely unknown and therefore many of the Pirate Parties in Europe and wound the world demand that all the documents be made public and that the present draft of this legislation put under a serious spotlight.
The ACTA trade agreement envisages the restriction of the free use of the Internet in order to protect the rights of certain companies.
Officially the agreement is aimed at the same of counterfeit products but the already published documents show that this trade agreement, which seems to be ending up as a binging international law rather than a trade agreement, is rather another attempt by certain parties to curtail and restrict further the rights of consumers and to control and censor the contents of websites for economic reasons.
In other word, this could lead to the taking down of websites, such as, for instance Blogs, because the author disagrees with the practices of certain companies and such like.
It is time that the governments of those countries that are party to the ACTA discussions be held accountable by the people of their respective countries as to what this agreement is really all about and to hold their discussions in the open. If they have nothing to hide why not open the doors?
© 2010
