The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been getting some attention here and there, mainly for the potential for file sharers to get disconnected. Turns out there's a lot more on the horizon; quite apart from the agreement's potential to ban fairly innocuous practises such as deep linking (boy Google, are you in trouble), the European Commission's Directorate-General for Trade has been soliciting. (pause) Ahem, that was worth the sentence fragmentation. To resume, the DG has been soliciting input and commentary from various stakeholders.

The Global Intellectual Property Center under the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the wold's largest lobbyist organization) has responded with this letter (that's a pdf link). It's a really good read, and I commiserate unequivocally. With the mothers who raised these slimeballs.

It's a bee-in-the-bonnet weekend again, and having left the draft petition text up for a week for comments it is now live right here.

Sign it, tell other people about it, if you're on facebook or other social media spread the word, make your voice heard.

You know I have a bee in my bonnet when I blog twice on the same topic in the space of a scant few hours after a blogging hiatus of several months (well it's either that or I'm scatterbrained; your pick).

I don't want to let this slide. e-voting is too important. I'm not the Welfare Minister, but we live in a country where that person should answer to the people and perhaps we just need to shout loudly enough. So I have decided to draft a petition, and I need your help.

This article was written with the objective of understanding how traditional Islamic law would or does regard intellectual property, with the emphasis here and there (as relevant) to open culture and free software. I am not a lawyer, and this article was written with the support of some beer (though not too many); my claims to authority, weak as they may be, are living in Egypt for some 17 or 18 years and having played a solid role in creating the Egyptian Linux Users Group. I am open to discussion (that's what the comments are for!) and will revise this article when time and reasons avail themselves.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.