Artist: 彩季なお

Remember the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act from 2011? These acts aimed to stop piracy, but at the same time introduced unintended consequences since the legislation was so broad that companies and government can use it to request internet service providers to censor sites. If thy were to pass, companies can use it to censor your content and limit free speech. Thankfully, people protested and these two legislations died. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) faced the same fate since it was SOPA-like.

Now, we have a new bogeyman that will threaten free speech, reign in censorship and limit free speech. This will not only destroy anime blogging, but the anime fandom as we know it. That is the TPP, which is commonly referred to as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secret trade deal that involves the United States and other Asian countries in the pacific, including Australia, Canada, Japan and others.

This recently leaked treaty has a lot of nasty copyright restrictions that will undermine fair use and make copyright violations a criminal offense. This mean that you might get a hefty fine or even get thrown into jail. With that, I’m going to share some background information about the treaty and then go into certain provisions that will possibly impact the anime fandom as a whole.
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