INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION WRITE-UP

5 questions

1. What is your problem?
2. How big is your problem?
3. How will it impact society if it is not solved?
4. Why does the problem exist?
5. What is the root cause?

My problem is ACTA(Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). ACTA is a very very very(notice on the emphasis on very) big problem. On the surface, ACTA looked like they’re trying to protect intellectual property, its suppose to prevent people from making fake copies of something. The dictionary says counterfeiting is fraudulent imitation of something else, but when a file is copied on the internet, it is exactly the same as the original, it’s just sharing, and the original file is still there.

They are trying to take over the internet. Although their name is called a ‘Trade Agreement’ but they intend to do more than that. Last year, Singapore’s government signed the treaty with ACTA behind our backs. Deciding laws by themselves. ACTA wants to monitor what we do, and our freedom of speech would be destroyed ultimately. Their aim is to ‘police’ us in every single thing we do online. Not only that, for example, you learn a recipe on how to cook a delicious chicken, and you went home and shared this with your wife, but under ACTA, both of you are now criminals because you shared information free of charge, you may think that no one would know about it since its private at home, but ACTA surveys your communication line as well just in case, so you lose all civil rights and liberties

Your ISP(Internet Service Provider) will be forced to open up and inspect every data package and look for copyrighted information. That means that sending an mp3 file through email, uploading a video using copyrighted music, you’re wrong and you could be fined or sent to prison. You may think this benefits singers, music producers, but they also lose from this, because they’re now held by the same rules. Ideas can no longer be refined any further. This censorship, may cause you to lose your facebook or twitter account.THIS is just a fraction of how big the problem can really impact us. Worse of all, you’ll lose your freedom of speech. So yes, we’re all criminals now. They probably haven’t taken action yet, thats why we’re all still sitting here.

The reason why ACTA exists is very simple, it is created by the people who benefitted from this are the people called the Content Mafia which includes media publishing companies, by solving the internet problems that threaten their business model. The root cause of ACTA, the people who wants to control the internet.

-Yi De-