Alright, you guys in one of the 40 countries that are meeting up to discuss this terrible agreement, let's discuss what this means (taken from [link] since they explain the lingo very well):

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* 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)

Basically, this could have been signed without any prior knowledge (for the American public at least). Australia has known about this for some time, although we've already got so many problems of our own at the moment - we have some of the strictest copyright laws in the world. There's also the issue of our internet being restricted and certain sites blocked.

There is no trial or need for evidence - just an accusation is enough to have your work taken down, or your internet cut off (after a probable Three Strikes system). There seems to be a lot of grey areas in this, and it's unknown if this agreement will extend to fanworks. If it does, fanart, fanfics and anything else related will be at risk. And that's just the shallow end of the pool since this could allow control over all other sorts of information. Many of our favourite sites could end up being taken down because of the sheer amount of work it would take to monitor all content, maybe even DA if things get bad.

I have to say this really does fill me with worry and fear. Usually I hate hearing this sort of comparison, but 1984... I think we're slowly making our way there. Everyone, spread the word of this around because if this gets the go-ahead I don't see things turning out very well.

Australia not having an R18+ rating for games seems so insignificant all of a sudden...