Heard of SOPA? What about ACTA?

Why You Should Care About It

ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development.

ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialized countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and (since TRIPs) the World Trade Organization. Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations.

The Fact Sheet published by the USTR together with the USTR's 2008 "Special 301" report make it clear that the goal is to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement above the current internationally-agreed standards in the TRIPs Agreement and increased international cooperation including sharing of information between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies. The last 10 bilateral free trade agreements entered into by the United States have required trading partners to adopt intellectual property enforcement obligations that are above those in TRIPs. Even though developing countries are not party to the ACTA negotiations it is likely that accession to and implementation of ACTA by developing countries will be a condition imposed in future free trade agreements and the subject of evaluation in content industry submissions to the annual Section 301 process and USTR report.

While little information has been made available by the governments negotiating ACTA a document recently leaked to the public entitled "Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement" from an unknown source gives an indication of what content industry rightsholder groups appear to be asking for – including new legal regimes to "encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders in the removal of infringing material" criminal measures and increased border search powers. The Discussion Paper leaves open how Internet Service Providers should be encouraged to identify and remove allegedly infringing material from the Internet. However the same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens' Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the "Three Strikes" /Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers. While mandating copyright filtering by ISPs will not be technologically effective because it can be defeated by use of encryption efforts to introduce network level filtering will likely involve deep packet inspection of citizens' Internet communications. This raises considerable concerns for citizens' civil liberties and privacy rights and the future of Internet innovation.

Havonej wrote:The good thing is stuff like this gets over turned all the time, when people get pissed off enough. The issue is a lot of people still don't even know it's out there so they wont get angry.

waterdragon7 wrote:
Perhapsd Wikipedia needs to have one or more additional "blackout" days prior to the presidential election this November. As noted from this article, if attempts are made to enforce ACTA, due to it having been "passed" by executive order, there is a major question as to the constitutionality of ACTA.

whois lookup wrote:Registrant:
Megavideo Limited
P.O. Box 28410
Gloucester Road Post Office
Wan Chai, Hong Kong 00000
HK

Registrar: DOTREGISTRAR
Domain Name: MEGAVIDEO.COM
Created on: 13-NOV-00
Expires on: 13-NOV-14
Last Updated on: 23-SEP-11

Administrative, Technical Contact:
Limited, Megavideo domain@megavideo.com
P.O. Box 28410
Gloucester Road Post Office
Wan Chai, Hong Kong 00000
HK
+852-301-37707


Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.MEGAVIDEO.COM
NS2.MEGAVIDEO.COM
NS3.MEGAVIDEO.COM
NS4.MEGAVIDEO.COM

End of Whois Information

How can a site that allows users to create forms possibly turn up on the radar of the US government? The reason for the seizure is apparently user content, meaning one or more JotForm users created forms that have set alarm bells ringing.

Even so, it seems like a step too far to take down the entirety of JotForm due to user content, which the site has little control over. I’m also finding it difficult to understand how JotForm can be implicated directly as forms are embedded on 3rd-party sites and the content goes to the owner of that site via email. At most, JotForm is the intermediary in that process and could easily be asked to take down specific forms.

Understandably, JotForm users are upset because their forms have stopped working. However, the anger seems to be generally aimed at JotForm. Like all online services, all JotForm can do is monitor user content and react to it. Is this a failing of their content monitoring? In the blog post detailing the seizure, JotForm points out they have over 2 million forms and they can’t “manually review all forms.”

If you’re wondering how the seizure happened, apparently a request was lodged with JotForm’s domain registrar GoDaddy and the site went down shortly afterwards. As for what’s happened to all the legitimate user forms, JotForm is providing a workaround using jotform.net instead of phishing-site.www