ACTA Threatens Your Freedom

ACTA was written secretly by governments together with business; in effect, a conspiracy to restrict the people for business' sake. There were leaks, and public condemnation removed some proposed nasty provisions, but plenty more remain.
The proponents of ACTA use the term "intellectual property", which is meant to discourage clear thinking. That term refers to ten or more unrelated laws, which at the practical level have nothing in common. The term focuses on an irrelevant abstract similarity, and distracts attention from the real issues raised by one law or another.
A few of those laws have one point in common: megacorps want to change them to gain more power over future competition or the public, and ACTA is their latest try. ACTA has different rules for each law. The term "intellectual property" misrepresents the facts about ACTA.
ACTA's main effect in Europe would be on copyright law. ACTA gives copyright priority over human rights. It gives priority to copyright holders over the users of copyrighted works.
When the copyright lobby demands increased power to stop sharing, it bases the argument on exaggerated, unlikely claims of what they "lose" when people share. ACTA legitimizes these absurd claims, even in court, so you could be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of euros of imaginary "damages" for a little bit of file-sharing.
ACTA says governments can ask ISPs for "cooperation", which can include surveillance, filtering, deletion of pages, even punishment of users without a fair trial. Meanwhile, ISPs, hosting sites and search engines could be prosecuted if they do not censor.
Many aspects of ACTA are vague. For instance, it says governments must attack “means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes”. Will this ban blogging platforms? Bittorrent? File locker sites? Who knows?
Some aspects of ACTA are dishonest -- blackwhiting, to use Orwell's term (see 1984). For instance, it imposes criminal punishment on noncommercial copying by tying it to the word "commercial". Specifically, it says copying is "commercial scale" if it provides "direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage". What counts as "indirect economic advantage"? Arguably the benefit of not buying a second copy of something is enough to make noncommercial copying a crime.
Given ill will shown when governments negotiated ACTA, we must judge it by the worst possible interpretation. ACTA can be interpreted to make it a crime to share copies with your friends. Will the copyright lobby go to court and argue for this interpretation? Surely. Will it win? Don't give it the chance!
Some politicians say that ACTA is not something to fear, but they can't know what ACTA will morph into. One of the disasters of ACTA is that it can be altered later by agreement among the countries involved. In effect, these governments will together have the power to bypass their parliaments. To ratify ACTA is to give carte blanche to a rigged process.
The Internet needs some rules, but who should decide them? Traffic rules for cars should be decided democratically by the people, not written secretly by railroads. The Internet rules should be decided democratically by the people, with human rights as the first priority, and the people must reserve the right to relax rules if they prove too strict. That means, the rules must not come from ACTA! What should these rules be?
Copyright companies have too much power already; they have made copyright too strict. They are not satisfied and seek more power through ACTA, but that would be a change in the wrong direction. Their laws cause problems for us, and it is our turn now to be considered. Our governments must reduce copyright power: shorten copyright to 10 years, legalize noncommercial redistribution of exact copies (sharing), ban Digital Restrictions Management (the malicious features that turn digital devices into handcuffs), and ban EULAs on published digital works. Then we could consider small concessions to the copyright companies.
_________________________________

Copyright 2012 Richard Stallman -- Released under the CC-BY-ND 3.0 license;
first published in Poland, by Tygodnik Powszechny (taken from http://stallman.org/articles/acta-freedom.html)

Suggestions for National Constitutions

Aside from the specific articles below, I think that laws should require approval by a vote of the legislature and a direct vote of the people. The use of direct democracy as a part of the process seems to have protected the people well in Switzerland and Iceland.

 

 

Human rights

Human rights apply to all physical persons under the state's power or jurisdiction. They do not apply to legal creations such as corporations, which have whatever rights are granted to them by legislation.

 

Sovereignty

No treaty or international agreement may infringe the state's power to regulate the kinds of goods and services that may be offered for sale under its jurisdiction, or the allowable ways of producing them (regardless of where production is done); or to make such regulations consistent with human rights as are needed to protect society's public health, the country's financial health, its general standard of living, the environment, sustainability of economic activity, workers' rights, or human rights.
The state's exercise of the above power does not incur compensation to any party except as required by the state's own legislation.

 

Democracy

Aside from individuals spending small amounts, private spending to influence elections may be limited by legislation and the spenders may be required by legislation to identify themselves.

 

Closing the Revolving Door

The participation of former state officials in commercial activities that aim at influencing government, or were regulated by them in their official capacity, may be limited by legislation for up to 10 years.

 

Privatization

No state activity may be privatized unless the resulting private entity will sell its products or services in a competitive market that consisting mostly of private buyers.
If a former state activity was previously privatized in a way that contradicts this rule, the state can renationalize it paying, as compensation, the amount that the state received for it when it was privatized, minus the profit gained during the privatized entity's existence by that entity, and through that entity by related entities.

 

Right of reverse engineering

The right of an individual to study the functioning of any technological product that she owns or rents, and to publish what she learns about it, shall not be limited by any law, or by any contract agreed without individual negotiation.

 

Copyright and patent power can be decreased, not just increased

Copyrights and patents are temporary privileges created as artificial incentives, meant to achieve a balance between two public goals: the publication of new works and ideas, and the freedom to use existing published works and known ideas.
The state may through legislation increase or decrease the extent of existing copyright and patent privileges, or future ones. Decreasing a privilege does not entitle the holders of the privilege to compensation.

 

Freedom from computerized surveillance

The right of privacy from technological surveillance shall not be infringed without justification. Therefore, no party, whether public or private, may use information technology to systematically and automatically store beyond a short time any information about individuals or their activities, except when inherently necessary for dealings entered into by those individuals, for determining the taxes they owe, for enforcing regulations on their business activities, or pursuant to a court order detailing the persons to be surveilled and the information to be stored.

 

Freedom of recording

Persons' rights to openly carry out occasional photography and/or recording in places open at that time to the public, and to publish the results, shall not be infringed.

 

Agricultural Freedom

Farmers' rights to save, propagate, breed, and sell the food plants or animals that they have lawfully grown shall not be infringed.

 

Prohibition of general-purpose identity documents

Because general-purpose identity documents promote general surveillance, the state shall not issue credentials to individuals except for a specific limited purpose, and no such credential shall be checked for any purpose other than the one for which it was issued except pursuant to due process of law.
Published in 2013 in the public domain by Richard Stallman.
__________________________

Version of 7 July 2013.
Published in 2013 in the public domain by Richard Stallman (take from http://stallman.org/articles/constitution-suggestions.html)

On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license

Prominent universities are using a nonfree license for their digital educational works. That is bad already, but even worse, the license they are using has a serious inherent problem. When a work is made for doing a practical job, the users must have control over the job, so they need to have control over the work. This applies to software, and to educational works too. For the users to have this control, they need certain freedoms (see gnu.org), and we say the work is "free" (or "libre", to emphasize we are not talking about price). For works that might be useful in commercial contexts, the requisite freedom includes commercial use, redistribution and modification.
Creative Commons publishes six principal licenses. Two are free/libre licenses: the Sharealike license CC-BY-SA is a free/libre license with copyleft, and the Attribution license (CC-BY) is a free/libre license without copyleft. The other four are nonfree, either because they don't allow modification (ND, Noderivs) or because they don't allow commercial use (NC, Nocommercial).
In my view, nonfree licenses that permit sharing are ok for works of art/entertainment, or that present some party's viewpoint (such as this article itself). Those works aren't meant for doing a practical job, so the argument about the users' control does not apply. Thus, I do not object if they are published with the CC-BY-NC-ND license, which allows only noncommercial redistribution of exact copies.
Use of this license for a work does not mean that you can't possibly publish that work commercially or with modifications. The license doesn't give permission for that, but you could ask the copyright holder for permission, perhaps offering a quid pro quo, and you might get it. It isn't automatic, but it isn't impossible.
However, two of the nonfree CC licenses lead to the creation of works that can't in practice be published commercially, because there is no feasible way to ask for permission. These are CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA, the two CC licenses that permit modification but not commercial use.
The problem arises because, with the Internet, people can easily (and lawfully) pile one noncommercial modification on another. Over decades this will result in works with contributions from hundreds or even thousands of people.
What happens if you would like to use one of those works commercially? How could you get permission? You'd have to ask all the substantial copyright holders. Some of them might have contributed years before and be impossible to find. Some might have contributed decades before, and might well be dead, but their copyrights won't have died with them. You'd have to find and ask their heirs, supposing it is possible to identify those. In general, it will be impossible to clear copyright on the works that these licenses invite people to make.
This is a form of the well-known "orphan works" problem, except exponentially worse; when combining works that had many contributors, the resulting work can be orphaned many times over before it is born.
To eliminate this problem would require a mechanism that involves asking someone for permission (otherwise the NC condition turns into a nullity), but doesn't require asking all the contributors for permission. It is easy to imagine such mechanisms; the hard part is to convince the community that one such mechanisms is fair and reach a consensus to accept it.
I hope that can be done, but the CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses, as they are today, should be avoided.
Unfortunately, one of them is used quite a lot. CC-BY-NC-SA, which allows noncommercial publication of modified versions under the same license, has become the fashion for online educational works. MIT's "Open Courseware" got it stared, and many other schools followed MIT down the wrong path. Whereas in software "open source" means "probably free, but I don't dare talk about it so you'll have to check for yourself," in many online education projects "open" means "nonfree for sure".
Even if the problem with CC-BY-NC-SA and CC-BY-NC is fixed, they still won't be the right way to release educational works meant for doing practical jobs. The users of these works, teachers and students, must have control over the works, and that requires making them free. I urge Creative Commons to state that works meant for practical jobs, including educational resources and reference works as well as software, should be released under free/libre licenses only.
Educators, and all those who wish to contribute to on-line educational works: please do not to let your work be made non-free. Offer your assistance and text to educational works that carry free/libre licenses, preferably copyleft licenses so that all versions of the work must respect teachers' and students' freedom. Then invite educational activities to use and redistribute these works on that freedom-respecting basis, if they will. Together we can make education a domain of freedom.
________________________________

an article by Richard M. Stallman (original source published here in September 2012; license: Creative Commons Attribution Noderivs 3.0)
see French Translation