Over the last few weeks there has been an enormous wave of protests against the ACTA pact (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) in Poland. ACTA itself is supposed to be an international agreement to establish laws and standards for intellectual property protection. Think of ACTA as an international successor of DMCA.
Although DMCA itself has been criticized since its introduction in 1998 and has been abused numerous times (see "notice and takedown" criticism), it just works. But nobody is really happy about it: copyright holders claim it is still to difficult to take down stolen (= published against the license) content, and internet users feel the law limits their freedom of speech. The only group that should be happy with DMCA are internet and service providers (ISPs), which are not a subject to copyright law enforcement — provided they do follow the DMCA regulations and procedures.
One of many protests against ACTA in Warsaw.
Now ACTA is supposed to expand DMCA mechanisms world-wide, but in a quite awkward and controversial way. How bad is ACTA? Let us just say that in March 2010 EU adopted a resolution containing numerous objections against ACTA at the time, regarding freedom rights, privacy issues, secrecy of negotiations while creating ACTA and other legal aspects. Some of them still hold.
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