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Last month, the whole world showed their unity against Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, as it was already shelved by Rep. Lamar Smith. You know why? Due to the websites like Wikipedia, Google, Facebook and Warrior Forum going black to show their protests, they let me and the rest of the world to be aware about this. On  January 18 2012, there are 80 SOPA supporters and 31 opponents. But on the following day, it was surprising that the SOPA supporters have gone down to 63, and the opponents rose to 131.

But the war isn’t over yet, you know?

President Barack Obama of the United States maybe against SOPA and PIPA, but there’s one treaty that he indeed signed with the EU Parliament, and it’s what we call ACTA. For some reasons, ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is SOPA’s big brother, and it is much worse than ever. This international treaty signed by at least 22 countries (including US, Japan, Poland, Ireland, etc.) allows huge media companies and businesses to censor your internet to combat online piracy and physical goods counterfeiting. The worse thing is that ACTA was negotiated in secret, without counseling the public first.

When this treaty will be officially passed through the number of votes on the EU Parliament, there are so many worse things we could expect with them:

1. They might take down websites with copyrighted content. For example, if your video is about a birthday tribute with Lady Gaga’s song, they will take it down and possibly explain it to the court. What if a 3-year old kid downloads a music, huh? Does it make sense?

2. They will order search engines and payment processors to cancel their negotiations with websites that includes copyrighted content (at least one tiny thing).

3. Internet service providers (ISP’s) are required to terminate the subscriptions of every customer who downloads copyrighted material from various sources.

4. Mobile phones, iPods, tablets and laptops with music and software that are downloaded illegally will be confiscated by the authorities.

Does it violate something to our rights?

Of course, it does violate our online privacy rights! Every website that we visit, they will censor it. It means that this law or treaty is not the real solution to combat online piracy, it will only end our freedom of speech. As a result, this will impact lots of online businesses around the world. Internet subscriptions may be lessened due to this international treaty, because we are being limited on using this carefully.

This is why we have to stop ACTA as soon as possible. We remind them that nobody owns the internet, because these old guys in the US Congress and the EU Parliament doesn’t really know what internet is all about. I have signed the petition to Avaaz to combat ACTA, so far more than 1 million people have signed the petition already. The new goal right now is to reach more than 2 million signups. You can participate by signing the petition HERE. Although we agree to fight online piracy, but we don’t allow them to violate our online and privacy rights! There must be another way to do this, as long it does not harm our freedom of speech.

Is ACTA something that we should be afraid of?

If in case this international treaty has passed via the votes of the EU Parliament, this is something we should be afraid of. But it’s not yet too late for us to stand strong and unite against ACTA, we should convince them not to vote against this horrible treaty. We may have defeated SOPA and PIPA, but it’s time for us to defeat the most horrible ACTA to keep our internet open and free.