U.S Plan To Destroy The Internet

You know all those websites you like: YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, Rapidshare? Well, they'll all be flushed merrily down the tubes when a new U.S drafted legislation comes to pass.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations are currently taking place in Seoul, Korea. As part of the talks the United States has drafted the chapter on internet security under enormous secrecy, with only selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.

It's almost poetic that a draft legislation designed to "secure" the internet and feasibly be used to make leaks a criminal act should itself leak, but that is what it has. The veritable A-Bomb (America really needs to stop dropping those, even the metaphorical ones) is likely to inflame near enough everyone now its contents have been scrutinised. Here's what the entire world has to look forward to should it go unchallenged:

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - Internet Chapter Summary

• That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

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• That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied access to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

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• That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

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• Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

And you thought the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was bad!

* Summaries taken from boingboing.net.