well you see my mother wants me to stop reading manga (online) since its illegal....well this all started with ACTA...so I wanted to know:

• does acta go after people if they view sites on the internet that are illegal?..They go after the sites hosting them and the groups uploading them..but do they also go after the people viewing this site?...
  this question has been on my mind for a few days now and I can't find an answer anywhere >.<

-what will happen if I view such a "illegal" site?...the consequences?
...and wouldn't that be kinda stupid ...for example I'll surf the net and accidently click on some site and the content happens to be illegal....then what?

...well sry for posting this here but maybe someone knows?...am I making mountains out of molehills??

I've been reading online for several years now and never experienced a problem. There so little chance of you being prosecuted that you can sleep easy.

You'll be fine for these reasons:

1. Funding. The government (well, all of them) is in debt. I seriously doubt they will spend the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for putting everyone who reads manga online on trial.

2. Multinational. ACTA is a treaty followed by many nations. If history is repeated (as it often is) there are few consequences to breaking the treaty in such a minor fashion.

There are more but I think the point's across with these two. It was probably pretty clear after the first one. Most scanalation groups are secure as well because most don't make money from what they do.

Point: So long as you're not selling it and making a profit off someone else's work, you're fine 🙂

Tesla: If an immortal vampire dies in a virtual world-

Magnus: -does he make a sound?

Likes: Action, adventure, drama, fantasy, historical, horror, mystery, psychological, sci-fi, seinen, josei, supernatural, tragedy, yaoi

...I read too much >.>

Actually, nobody really knows how it's going to work. As elementalfunding said, I don't think the government is going to put everyone in jail, that's impossible. They may just pick some people and arrest them as an "example". But definitely not because of visiting websites.
The problem with ACTA is not that everyone will be arrested (I suppose that some countries would end up with more people in prison than free), but when it finally passes, the government is able to actually block the sites with what they consider illegal, so you wouldn't even be able to break the law. And the Internet is for many people the only possible source of manga, for example.

Anyway, don't worry, nobody is going to do anything to you because you read manga scans or click something accidentally.

Quote from Hanae

Actually, nobody really knows how it's going to work. As elementalfunding said, I don't think the government is going to put everyone in jail, that's impossible. They may just pick some people and arrest them as an "example". But definitely not because of visiting websites.
The problem with ...

"Blocking" doesn't work. At all. All you have to do is input the IP address and their block is defunct. It's why SOPA doesn't work in practice either.

Tesla: If an immortal vampire dies in a virtual world-

Magnus: -does he make a sound?

Likes: Action, adventure, drama, fantasy, historical, horror, mystery, psychological, sci-fi, seinen, josei, supernatural, tragedy, yaoi

...I read too much >.>

Quote from elementalblood

"Blocking" doesn't work. At all. All you have to do is input the IP address and their block is defunct. It's why SOPA doesn't work in practice either.

And this is where you are wrong.... or at least in part.
Without telling the server which site you want, it serves a default site or nothing at all... Subdomains, hardlinks*, and multiple virtual domains would not work that way.

Little background information:
A machine is hosting a website -> that machine either has an external IP or is behind a NAT (which sends incoming requests to the right internal IP).
The machine runs a webserver, doesn't really matter what kind, this webserver interprets incoming requests and serves the right content. Note that it's possible for any single webserver to host multiple websites (which is quite common).
When requesting a webpage without giving a domain name (by IP), the webserver doesn't know which site to return. Usually resulting in a 404 or a "default" domain.

Now, there are three different ways of "blocking" access to a domain:

1. Taking the website/server down
2. Removing DNS records (lookup table for ip<->domain name), the easiest method and most commonly used
3. Blocking IP access, very easy for ISPs to do and very little you can do about it (without tunnelling).

What could work though, is simple changing your hosts(.ini) file or a proxy DNS.
If you were to put into your hosts file:
127.0.0.1 mangaupdates.com www.mangaupdates.com
Attempting to visit mangaupdates would result in an error (assuming you're not running a webserver locally).
If you were to do this with "blocked" domain names, hardlinks* would continue to work.

*hardlinks - full links to files, not relative ones (thus including the domain name).

Quote from zero-chan

well you see my mother wants me to stop reading manga (online) since its illegal....well this all started with ACTA...so I wanted to know:

• does acta go after people if they view sites on the internet that are illegal?..They go after the sites hosting them and the groups uploading them..but do the ...

Okay, why are you just assuming it's "illegal". By whose laws and are you sure those apply to you?
If one country decides something is illegal, that doesn't mean it will be in every other one. Laws end at the border. Most countries have signed the Berne convention, which deals with this issue and should be a first step in understanding better what is, and what is not allowed.

You should also note that there is a difference between downloading and visiting a website (even though it's basically the same thing). I could visit a site like mangafox and be very confident in knowing I'm doing nothing illegal. Same as if I were to visit youtube and watch/listen to music videos. The responsibility lies not with me but with the host.

Secondly, as long as you are not making any money of it and are not actively spreading "illegal" content (the occasional reader thus), you should be relatively safe.

And lastly, we simply don't know. Laws are vague and it's often up to a judge to interpret and apply them correctly, which leaves way too many uncertainties and grey areas (hence why there are legal advisers)... Sometimes this is good, but more often it's a bad thing (as the people that sue you usually have more money=better representative=more influence).
If I were to get sued for illegal downloading, even if they can't prove a thing, I'd be pretty much screwed anyway with laws as they are now (where I live).
"They" already have all the power, even if something is not officially allowed by the law, if they have it in for you, you are screwed (point in case, megaupload).
That said, having seem some "real" uploaders I don't think we casual downloaders have much to fear. Where I download maybe 4GB per month (nearly all of which legal or legal-ish), I've seen uploaders with x1000 that.

As someone who actually red the whole damn thing, I can say you that it depends on your country. For example what they say is really vague, so there are provisions like: "The membership country will provide adequate measures for holders of copyrights in proportionality to other punishments"

But there is going to be a commission which undoubtedly will be filled with people of the entertainment industry. Who probably think when countries do not have the same punishments as the USA it's not heavy enough. And that would be bad...

As the United States have one of the worst criminal systems in the developed world.

Manga is too small of a market to matter, especially in the western world. Games, music and movies aren't, though that depends entirely on who owns the rights and where. Torrenting the discography of a Russian underground black metal band differs from torrenting anything in the last.fm top 100. There's nobody to sue your ass for manga, as those relatively small companies that publish the stuff lack the resources and puppets that for example Warner and EA have. People are after money, not justice and if they lack the power and pawns, they don't earn enough to compensate the costs and risks of the hunt.

Did you know that over half of the 'fake' takedown notices are aimed at rival companies? ACTA is really vague and has little to do with the average user but it opens the way for future abuse by allowing a large company to effectively starve a smaller (on the internet) one through international channels instead of going through the US.

I heard the laws in ACTA are so vague they may include generic medicines, giving the power to the owner of the patent for the medicines original composition to seize all generics (copies of the medicine created in different labs that are usually cheaper) from the market and destroy them. This is bats**t insane. There are countries where most medicine is generic, they're highly dependent on this. I don't think ACTA will ever pass (unless these countries wish to kill a part of the population with common colds and enrich some labs at cost of the rest of the population).

Someone also mentioned to me that this affected ownership rights of seeds and vegetables, no matter what this means and entails, it is also crazy.

Anyway, who are the stooges who make and approve these asshat laws? No one ever elected them, I think. I certainly did not. Also, how is something of this magnitude and spread passed without any kind of referendum?

If ACTA really pulls through and is put into effect in all these random areas, there will be riots for sure. It won't live long.

Quote from guy12

I heard the laws in ACTA are so vague they may include generic medicines, giving the power to the owner of the patent for the medicines original composition to seize all generics (copies of the medicine created in different labs that are usually cheaper) from the market and destroy them. This is bat ...

According to French EP member Kader Arif, "The problem with ACTA is that, by focusing on the fight against violation of intellectual property rights in general, it treats a generic drug just as a counterfeited drug. This means the patent holder can stop the shipping of the drugs to a developing country, seize the cargo and even order the destruction of the drugs as a preventive measure." He continued, "Generic medicines are not counterfeited medicines; they are not the fake version of a drug; they are a generic version of a drug, produced either because the patent on the original drug has expired, or because a country has to put in place public health policies," he said.

• Wikipedia

Luckily ACTA is still not ratified, but from events this year I've learned that "we the people" have very little to no say in things... Even if ACTA were to be dropped, another act will follow.
The EU was supposed to be open and democratic... Yet there is suspiciously much cloak and dagger politics going on, not to mention the nepotism/favouritism we simply can't seem to get rid of.