Portal:ACTA/Essential points

Blueprint for laws such as SOPA, ACTA, would impose new criminal sanctions and measures pushing Internet actors to "cooperate" with the entertainment industries to monitor and censor online communications, bypassing the judicial authority. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet actors.

Private Police
By imposing the liability of internet service providers and access providers for the transmission or storage of copyrighted material, ACTA will radically alter the shape of the Internet. In practice such legal uncertainty will turn all Internet operators into private police and justice auxiliaries. ACTA will force internet actors to accept any kind of content filtering, content removing, and "three strikes"-like "voluntary" agreements.

ACTA restricts your rights
Jurisdictions and parliaments already decided that Internet access was essential for the exercise of fundamental rights (European Parliament twice with am. 138 and with final Telecoms Package text, Constitutional court in France, decision 2009-580). ACTA, negotiated out of any democratic control, goes against this. By restricting access to the Internet, ACTA will therefore restrict our fundamenal freedoms (expression, information, communication).

Lack of transparency
The lack of transparency of the negotiated text might be considered as "normal" for trade agreements, but ACTA is much more than a trade agreement as it has an impact on criminal rights, and on the whole Internet ecosystem. Such important matters requires democratic process and transparency. ACTA circumvents democracy. This is a partial page. It is visible in Portal:ACTA