I can’t stress heavily enough the importance of our right to free speech.  Ever since it was written into the constitution under the First Amendment, it has been a sacred right that no American would willingly concede.

This is why I applaud the American people for standing up to fight against SOPA and PIPA, recent bills in Congress, while intending to stop online piracy that would have limited free speech and our access to information on the Internet.

However, even after SOPA and PIPA were shut down by Congress last week, an even bigger infringement upon our right to free speech threatens to pass on a global scale. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been in the making since 2006, when it was developed by Japan and the U.S. in an effort to crack down on copyright infringements.

Today, it exists as an international treaty in the works between many countries, including the U.S. and the entire European Union as well as Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Singapore.

If enacted, not only would ACTA create harsher rules against Internet piracy, but to protect patents it would make it difficult for generic drugs as well as certain seeds to reach third-world countries that vitally need them.

The consequences of this are unthinkable. ACTA would make Internet service providers legally viable for anything their users do online.

This would make the providers essentially act as “Internet police” to protect themselves. In the meantime, common users like you and I have to be careful about what we post. Anything could be potentially taken down by the government for even groundless copyright concerns.

This means it would be vastly more difficult to portray our political beliefs via the Internet, taking away a primary way in which citizens participate in political discussion.

Therefore, one could say ACTA would weaken our democracy. The revolution in Egypt, for example, may not have occurred under ACTA because so much of it was organized on the Internet.

The Internet will no longer be a strong tool for free speech.When SOPA and PIPA were killed by Congress I was relieved the laws would not come into action, but I was equally relieved that all of the bustle over “free speech” would die down.

I’d heard the words so many times I began to doubt their meaning. I thought, “Why yes, free speech is crucially important, but maybe we were taking this protest too far.”

Stopping online piracy and illegal downloading is a good thing. Maybe it’s worth giving up our urge to download songs for free and our ability to access certain information. The Internet would still be there; it would just be more regulated.

But is our cherished right to free speech really worth giving up in order to stop a few smaller injustices such as Internet piracy?

We should never have to give up a “little bit” of our First Amendment rights in order to protect something else.

If that were the case, free speech would be tugged and pulled at by our government until there is none left to take.

Unfortunately, President Obama already signed ACTA in September 2011, so there is little the American people can do in comparison to SOPA and PIPA.

However, while the European Union signed on to the act last Thursday, it still needs to be presented to the European Parliament for a vote. SOPA and PIPA may have been defeated, but the protests should never be over – not when something as crucial as free speech is at stake.