Boing Boing has gotten a lot of eyes this week with Cory Doctorow's post on the leaked text of the "secret" Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which the Obama administration has refused to discuss on supposed "national security" grounds. The treaty, in Doctorow's summary of Michael Geist's original analysis, will mean the following:

• * 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.

   

• *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 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.

   

• * 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.

   

• * 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)

I first saw this linked and discussed by MetaFilter, but since then it's crossed my newsreader through Atrios, Crooks and Liars, Huffington Post, and even the Macintosh News Network, as well as appeared in any number of other places. And it's no wonder that regular users of the Internet are aghast; even putting aside the unfair guilty-until-proven-innocent standard that would eviserate the principle of fair use (particularly for academic purposes), as well as the ways in which selective enforcement could turn this into a very useful cudgel for squashing dissent, ACTA threatens to dramatically alter and perhaps destroy the way the Internet is used, all in the name of draconian "protections" for corporate copyright holders from uses that may not even constitute infringement in the first place.

China, it should be noted, is not participating in these talks -- a fact which will likely make the treaty a failure regardless of its passage, and which demonstrates once again how the political and economic consequences of globalization can sometimes be very difficult to pin down.

I'd link to an opposing view, but I haven't seen one; as best I can tell, the proponents of this treaty, the Obama administration inscrutably among them, just don't want to talk about it. And those who do want to talk about it are very angry; when I posted this on my blog, one of my commenters replied: "it's a shame we don't have revolutions anymore." He wasn't joking.