The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* 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.

* 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 access 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)

Look, this thing isn't about pirated music or downloaded movies. I'm a content creator myself, and I know what it's like to be ripped off. Hell, I've seen posts from this very blog published on other sites without so much as a byline or a by-your-leave.

This ain't that.

This is about free speech. This is about blogging. If every ISP has to hire an in-house police force, two things will happen: 1. Everyone's monthly bill will go way up. 2. Customers will be prevented from using services like Blogger.

Think about the quoted material in this very post. Have I followed the letter of the law? I don't know, and neither do you. The law has not determined just how many words one may quote under the "fair use" rubric. Instead of playing count-the-letters, the ISPs will simply tell customers not to blog. True, no sane individual could claim that my lengthy quotes did financial harm to either Boing Boing or HuffPo -- but if this treaty goes through, mere sanity will no longer matter.

This treaty will return us to the days when freedom of the press belonged only to those who owned a press.

People won't stand for this.

Barack Obama is about to become the least popular president in history -- and the Democratic party will get a rep as the party that tried to censor the internet.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over this. When I was running my wife's web hosting companies, I didn't have much trouble with DMCA. I simply required complaining parties to send a DMCA takedown notice, notarized signatures, certified mail. Nobody ever bothered.

Because the cost of doing so was more than the loss of income from a lost sale?
Remember Napster?
The artists and the companies that produce them have a right to remuneration for their efforts, nobody disputes this.
What concerns me is that there are sites like Dailyhowler and Mediamatters that police the print and broadcast media calling them on their lies and distortions.
How can they be effective if they can reproduce those lies and distortions to refute them?