User blog:Another Poetic Spartan/ACTA and the Fair Use Rationale

Alright, your friendly neighbourhood admin here. As many of you have heard, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trading Act has been passed.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an international treaty under negotiation that will have far-reaching ramifications for how millions of internet users share copyrighted material online. It is a US-led initiative, with strong support from Japan. Other countries involved in the negotiations include the EU, South Korea, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, NZ and Australia.

Negotiations are top-secret for 'national security reasons' - yet the US trade representative has allowed certain interest groups to view the document. These include people from Google, eBay, Intel, Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, the MPAA and RIAA. Members of the public have largely been kept in the dark, apart from leaks online.

But what has been leaked is scary enough. This treaty is going to give the copyright holders the teeth to enforce copyright law, and internet service providers are going to be the watchdogs. To be considered a 'safe harbour' from prosecution, ISPs will be obliged to operate a three-strikes policy for alleged copyright infringement (no evidence required): two warnings, and then a ban for one year for that household. There is some speculation that ISPs will share lists of banned households, preventing people from subscribing to another ISP in the meantime.

One year is a pretty long time to go without the internet.

Michael Geist, a Canadian law professor at the University of Ottawa, provides a great summary of the dangers of ACTA in an interview on CBC's As It Happens.

As ACTA is implemented, the internet will not be the same. Forget about watching music videos and film segments on YouTube. Forget about making fanvids and fanmixes. Forget about fansubs and scanlations. Forget about making screencaps for icons, website layouts, and lulz on image-hosting comms such as 4chan and [info]fandomsecrets.

No more bittorrenting your favourite films, TV shows, anime (you shouldn't be doing that for anime anyways. Need to buy it when we can so companies can come out with more and even better stuff) No more sharing of manga raws. And don't think you can hide on US Enet or IRC either. The groups providing these services will be subject to the same 'safe harbour' requirements too. When your country gets into bed with the US or other signatory states over trade, you too will have to comply with ACTA.

As for the grey area of fanfic and fanart, they may very well clamp down on that too. ACTA has redefined criminal copyright infringement to include significant wilful infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. So it no longer matters if your activities are not-for-profit. As far as ACTA is concerned, you are still committing a criminal offence - which means the government can come after you. (Actually, copyright infringement is already a criminal offence here - people have served jail time for sharing music online).

Guess what this means?

Our wiki itself is under threat. Yah, really. Of course, it will go through on 2013, so we've gone one more year. But it still has the chance of being rebuked, so we could be fine. You can never be too cautious, after all though.

The free content on this wiki is defined as content that does not bear copyright restrictions on the right to redistribute, study, modify and improve, or otherwise use works for any purpose in any medium, even commercially. But because free as in cost and free as in freedom are two entirely different concepts, images freely available on the Internet may still be inappropriate for our wiki. Any content not satisfying criteria, such as "non-commercial use only" images, images with permission for use on wikis only, or images fully copyrighted are therefore classified as non-free.

So, I'm asking you all to do me a favour, please. Please add fair use rationale to all pics that are canon or copyrighted in some way. Whenever you upload an image, or heck, go to your old images, click on the image, then click for image details and it'll take you to the image page. Afterwards, go and click "edit" and fill out the fair use rationale if it's someting copyrighted and such.

Thank you for your time.