I really hope you're right about all this. Still wondering why there's no SOPA-style outbreak in any EU country but Poland. Maybe because we all, like me, just sit and wonder?
> there's no SOPA-style outbreak in any EU country but Poland.
Greetings from Ireland, where we've spent the whole week kicking the government's arse over a nasty bit of Record-Company-Felching, and a Dáil debate was just forced onto the agenda not 15 minutes ago during an emergency discussion.
This is not surprising, since ACTA is still months away from being effective and news concerning its dangers and shortcomings are only now starting to be visible.
However, there is also another, perhaps major, issue: the tech sector is just not as large or impactful as in the US (or, at least, this is the public perception): no community hub such as Silicon Valley, very few dominant businesses, very few startups and VCs capable of flexing their muscles.
I fear that if we are unable to get major US companies to protest ACTA, such legislation might simply slide past unseen by most.
Most EU countries have a multiparty system with somewhat less buyable politicians than the US has in exchange, though. This might help. After all, why else did it take so long for ACTA-ish laws to show up at all?
Or maybe I'm just naive (I like to believe that most of our politicians are selfish and stupid, but not corrupt) and missing something.
There are no outbreaks in other EU countries, because the media don't write/talk about ACTA. So the societies are completely ignorant about ACTA's existence.
In Poland, some mainstream media had the balls to talk about ACTA, which coincided with high-profile "hacking" attacks on govt websites. This lead to a sudden spread of public awareness. And when the kids heard that free downloading of mp3s, movies and porn is threatened, they took to the streets. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502200)
And how did the media learn about ACTA in the first place? That's still a bit of a riddle to me. Certainly some active NGOs, like the Panoptykon Foundation, and enlightened individuals, like Piotr Waglowski (a lawyer of some fame in the digital community) have contributed by constantly pesking the govt about ACTA.
Well, for instance in the Netherlands, we have a lobby organisation called Bits of Freedom, who are basically an EFF but less Linuxy.
They are usually rather capable of causing a somewhat decent ruckus when nasty stuff happens, and they usually quickly get the support of at least the liberals and the far-right-conservatives (who are pretty consistently in favour of free and open internet though nobody understands why).
Still, nothing about ACTA. Thanks for laying out the Polish case for me though.
A digital civil rights movement that prefers secretive backroom politics over public activism is not exactly the right organisation to protest secretive backroom politics...
This is typical for BoF. "They" decide what's important, behind closed doors. They are no different from ruling political class, which is both their strength (when it comes to lobbying) and their weakness (when it comes to representing the people who's rights they claim to stand up for).
The start of the negotiation process was formally acknowledged in various diplomatic venues, as it usually is for these treaties: for such large negotiations the bureaucracy is huge (the days of Molotov-Ribbentropp are long gone), so people knew something was going to happen.
Then negotiators tried hard to keep any interested NGO and independent parties from getting access; inevitably, their interest was piqued even more, and leaks started to appear, as they always do when Evil Stuff is in the works.
I'm pretty sure people like Cory Doctorow were banging the drums about ACTA years ago.
