[Coda]

The biggest complaint about ACTA, really, is that it was negotiated in secret, so no one that would be affected by the treaty could actually know what was going to happen until it was too late to do anything about it. There were also some nasty clauses in the leaked drafts (like "break the rules three times and your Internet access is revoked for life") but those were removed before the final version.

I've actually read over the full text of the final version of ACTA (that is, the version that the US signed) and honestly it's not all THAT bad. It's MOSTLY about stopping counterfeit products from being imported or exported. The big problem is that it's designed to be able to fast-track prosecution for intellectual property violations -- which in itself isn't a problem, but the mechanism by which it does that has some chilling effects: ACTA requires that a whole array of companies (for example, Internet service providers) have to turn over information related to alleged offenses when ordered by the authorities. Taken on its own this doesn't sound too scary, but the information that's required is stuff that most ISPs (especially smaller ones) simply don't track. This encourages them to gather more information about their customers and their customers' activities online in order to comply with information requests. This could put smaller ISPs out of business just by the costs of having to implement this.

Another potential problem is that service providers will want to censor user content to avoid being potentially held liable for infringement. ACTA as written is unclear on this, and that lack of clarity is actually the worst problem, because it makes it uncertain what kind of "safe harbor" provisions provided by existing laws will still apply and which won't.

And then the biggest problem, at least in my opinion, is that it further criminalizes behavior and tools that "circumvents" technological means of limiting the consumer's rights. So for example, if you buy music that's copy-protected, it becomes illegal to convert that music to MP3 format in order for it to work on your music player. It means that ONLY authorized vendors may produce decoders -- this is particularly problematic for Linux users, because it essentially makes it illegal to watch DVDs using open-source software, even if you're not doing anything wrong; it criminalizes what would currently be considered fair use of your own property.