ACTA – Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

www.russiatoday.com The personal computer may soon be not-so-private, with the US and some European nations working on laws allowing them access to search the content held on a person’s hard drive. President Obama’s administration is keeping unusually tight-lipped on the details, which is raising concerns among computer users and liberty activists. Almost everyone today owns a music player and a laptop. But what if the Government decided to allow itself to access these personal devices for no specific reason whatsoever? In extreme secrecy from the public, the Obama administration is hammering out an international copyright treaty with several other countries and the European Union. Under the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), governments will get sweeping new powers to search and seize material thought to be in breach of copyright. While the Obama administration calls these secretive plans a development of national security, Richard Stallman, a prominent American software freedom activist, calls it a secret war on sharing: Because we wouldnt like it if we knew, they are trying to do policy laundering, Stillman says. Democracy gets bypassed and they can do to us whatever they want. I can only guess that its going to be nasty, because if it werent going to be nasty, they wouldnt need to keep a secret. Up until now, the breach of copyright has been a civil matter. The Obama administration seems to now want to criminalize it. And even though recent reports suggest …