Why shouldn’t a US media company kick you off the internet with no right of appeal?

Do you remember voting for the government to force your ISP to spend your money sifting through your internet logs to check that you’re not infringing a foreign corporation’s potential copyright? No? That’s weird:

Negotiations on the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement start in a few hours in Seoul, South Korea.

What will that mean? Well, the US Administration (which is pushing the ACTA) is ludicrously claiming it’s a “national security” matter, and won’t reveal the details of what it’s demanding, but according to leaks the agreement will hold:

• 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.

I WANT YOU… to spend your citizens’ money chasing my campaign donors’ horrendously overblown IP claims around the world.

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)

Note to paranoiacs: the idea of a US corporation kicking you off the internet in Australia is much LESS scary than the idea of governments being cautious about our greenhouse emissions and agreeing to try to reduce them. Remember: corporate-pushed multinational agreement GOOD; scientist-pushed multinational agreement BAD.

ELSEWHERE: A British ISP highlights why cutting people off because a record exec says they’re file-sharers is dumb:

TalkTalk picked a random street in North London and showed that 23 of the households in that road were using WEP security to stop strangers from accessing their networks. WEP has been thoroughly broken for years, but many older games consoles, phones and other devices are only capable of using WEP to connect to WiFi networks. TalkTalk argues that householders who have done everything they can to secure their networks from people who want to use them for cover during illegal file-sharing are still vulnerable to being disconnected by record- and film-company execs.

Don’t these people know that it is the duty of ALL OF US to upgrade our equipment every time a US media company demands it?