Fun fact: You are responsible for what your IP-address does.

If you live in a western democracy, you are responsible on what your IP-address does on the Internet. This because of all the law enforcement and Intellectual Property enforcement. I don't like being responsible for my IP-address. Because I can't possibly know what is done on it at all times. It is millions lines of code that drives that IP-address. Even if all those lines that does stuff on the Internet was accessible to me(which they aren't) I would not be able to read through it and comprehend it. I'm a programmer at my day job, I can understand code. I can read code. But it is too much to understand if I try to comb through every line of code that could touch my IP-address. Think about it... you are responsible for what your computer(s) does on the Internet. Do you really understand at all times what happens under the hood?

ACTA has many problems...

But I'm not going to talk about those well known ones. You know that you can take your whole CD collection and put on your fancy new smartphone. It is fully legal to take you music that you bought over the years and carry it with you in a different format. But you can't do that with your DVD collection. It is strange because they both the same physical form but what makes the DVD different? And how is it related to ACTA?

When you buy CD with music it is not protected with encryption. When you buy a DVD it is encrypted to protect against piracy. Now some countries have protected the encryption for the purpose of copy protection. You are not allowed to sell or distribute software to break that encryption. It is already protected by laws and now ACTA wants to keep those laws in place.

The point of the laws are that pirates should not be able to easily obtain software so they can make easily distributable copies of DVD movies. The success of the law for that purpose has been less than stellar. Pirates are doing something that according to the law is illegal why would they care that break one more law?

The law has one side-effect. It quite effectively controls regular consumers. Regular consumers can't behave the same way. You can legally get your CD on to an iPod, but you can't store your DVD on an iPad unless you use the same tools as the pirates. No legal alternative for you. And with ACTA in place we might not see it for a long time.

There are many problems with ACTA and the problem that I just described might be the smallest one. But it is clear the encryption protections aren't there to protect you, they are there to protect your DVD movies from being watched on a tablet like an iPad.