I guess ACTA is not only affecting to those who are involved in copyright infringement, but seems to affect the freedom of speech that all of us have. Here Neo7 has made a great point, but what's the use of the internet if ACTA is going to police all the blogs and portals where we express our opinion? Earlier I read about cases where people were caught just for joking about the President (IIRC).
And if ACTA is just going to maximize and put an e-dictatorship on the internet...I guess we should stand against such a draconian body.
Link to such cases? It's one thing to make the claim and another to provide evidence for it.
Google "The Patriot Act".
I guess ACTA is not only affecting to those who are involved in copyright infringement, but seems to affect the freedom of speech that all of us have. Here Neo7 has made a great point, but what's the use of the internet if ACTA is going to police all the blogs and portals where we express our opinion? Earlier I read about cases where people were caught just for joking about the President (IIRC).
And if ACTA is just going to maximize and put an e-dictatorship on the internet...I guess we should stand against such a draconian body.
Link to such cases? It's one thing to make the claim and another to provide evidence for it.
Google "The Patriot Act".
And how is the ACTA going to be similar to the Patriot Act? The purpose of the Patriot Act was to prevent further terrorist attacks on the US which included going to extremes of jail without trial. Even then, resources for enforcing this are going only to a very small percentage within the US.
Apple Inc is giving a pretty good example all the time of what ACTA would be like at its worst with their trigger happy lawsuit style defenses for their IP rights. They're not particularly good when it comes to the legal process and Samsung is showing how easy it is to overcome if you are accused yet innocent.
Either way ACTA will primarily be focused on pirated music, pirated software, and pirated movies the movies (the things like MPAA and RIAA have been complaining consistently for over 10 years). Many "file sharing" sites have had poor implementations of cutting down on sharing of pirated material and that has been a good contribution to the development of ACTA in the first place.
If you really wanted "free as in freedom" you would not be using Windows and instead be using something like gNewSense and helping people like Richard Stallman in things such as the GNU Project. If more people had gone there and helped further things from there, ACTA may not have been the result of mass pirating. Below is a list of common items that are pirated every single day but don't have to be because of the GUN Project yet nobody supports that freedom because OMFG WANT THAT OTHER SOFTWARE WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT:
Link
Then why are people wasting their time mass complaining about proprietary systems and business instead of putting more effort into making these FOSS alternatives more visible and accessible? The more people that get to use them, the better developed they will be overtime. Look at Ubuntu and how much more polished it is now than it was just a few years ago ever since its huge bump in usage.
I wouldn't know, I'm not one of the people that complains. The simple fact is no amount of legislation is going to truly affect piracy, so I really couldn't care less about ACTA or whatever else.
When I find software that is better than the popular choice I tell people to use it. I've told many people about VLC, Firefox, and Paint.net but that's as far as my experience with free software goes.
And operating systems are a whole different issue. Moving to another internet browser or video player is simple and doesn't affect your other software, an operating system affects everything. It's more trouble than it's worth for 99% of people.
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