This is terribly late to press for which I apologise but tomorrow (Thursday 31st) MEP’s will
vote on ACTA, this has already been rejected by the Dutch government (though possibly just as an electioneering gimmick). Despite my tardiness if you haven’t already done so there is still time to e-mail your MEP. You could even use WriteToThem, which makes it terribly painless. If you’ve not heard of ACTA you may be wondering what the problem is then the OpenRightsGroup* explains it rather well here.
But in summary it’s yet another piece of legislation dreamt up between the EU and big business with no thought for ordinary people or the laws of unintended consequences. Beyond that it’s yet another reheating of the various anti-privacy laws our government has tried to introduce where by a business says “Joe Bloggs stole our picture” at which point your ISP pulls your website, if you’re lucky they’ll ask you first if not the first you’ll know is your website is gone. That is bad enough, and lets ignore the potential for false claims, but if you’re making any sort of money out of that website then you could be liable for criminal measures. The ISP could also be liable for criminal measures as they make money from hosting your content, so they’re really not likely to put up a fight.
Still not talking about false claims if you were to use an image to say criticise the artist, the artist could complain and demand that the ISP identify you, or more precisely:
“disclose expeditiously to a rights holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement”
Emphasis mine, so before it’s even been proven that you’ve infringed anything your details get handed over to some third party, unless your ISP fancies a fight. to give you an idea of the scale of problem ISP’s might be facing and so why they’re really unlikely to put up a fight consider this Google get 250,000 take down notices a week. So I think we can safely expect that for most of us the process will be that of rubber stamping and swift take down. Though I doubt that the same will apply when the mainstream media rip off our ideas and content.
If that’s not bad enough it’s yet another EU self amending bill, an unelected committee will be formed with the powers to amend it as the need arises.
So quick get writing to your MEP, and if you miss this time it’s got more stages to go yet so there is still time, and to think so much of this started from Godfrey Vs. Demon
*N.B. The Open Rights group is sadly an organisation that’s mor ethan problematic to support whole heartedly for reasons recounted by Katabasis
