USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, North Korea, New Zealand and Singapore already signed ACTA.

Mexico and Switzerland didn't want to sign the text. EU couldn't sign the text because this case never happend (who will sign the text in the name of the 27 member States?).

That's why we need to ACT as soon as possible.

Goverments are service businesses.

If I don't like the service of one business I put my money somewhere else.

Do you mean go in another country?

So, in this case, in a country that didn't signed ACTA?

And where would that be?

that is just my way to adapt to parliamential dictatures.. if you don't like it go protest somehwhere in Europe

Ok, so you don't like "parliamential dictatures", I supposed you also don't like plain dictatures. So let's take all the countries, and remove all the dictatures and countries that signed ACTA.

What's left?

We though I might change with Cameron. Well, it didn't.

Speak for yourself, but while I hoped it would change with Blair, but I have no delusions about Cameron.

Just to be clear, I'm not a UK citizen. So by "we" I didn't mean "we, fully informed UK citizen", but more "we, foreigners that don't know anything", were glad Blair was out, and hopped it will be better with the next one. But I had no clue how bad (or even who) Cameron was.

That video generates more questions in my brain than it answers.

What questions?

"ACTA is bad, nnkay?" it says, which is not enough.

It's enought for the video. Nobody would watch a 30 minutes boring video quoting obfuscated texts refering to more obfuscated texts already signed by countries dozens of years before that.

The point of this video is to try to get the interest of a lot of people. The one who didn't heard of ACTA before. Once these people are interested, they can seek informations by themselves. The link provided in the video, that's a good start. Or see the wikipedia page, seek on the search engine, or seek on their favorite online newspaper.

The extremely one-side view on ACTA the video provides sickens me.

Well, what do you suggest? A more positive approach? Like "Think of the future, nobody will be able to share knowledge, wouldn't that be great?".
What if everything is bad in ACTA?

It doesn't even tell me who "The Negotiators" are.

That's the point. "The Negotiators" are not known. ACTA has been negotiated in secret during the past few years. Withoout the control of the democratically elected parliaments or other institutions. Now the treaty is finalized and signed by some Countries. The other Countries now have a gun pressed against their head "sign it or you're out".

I can't say "No" to ACTA based on this video alone.

Of course you can't.
But maybe you can say no to ACTA based on this video + my comment + few other comments on this news, + on https://www.eff.org/issues/acta + https://www.laquadrature.net/en/acta + http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_tags&task=view&tag=acta&Itemid=408 + http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/why-acta-declaration + http://www.ffii.org/ + your own sources of information.

And if someday you want to say no, here is how: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA :)

Is the real threat to my freedom! British independence! Now!

I hope you're joking. :)

Cause ACTA is not EU specific. In fact, EU might be one of the last chances to stop ACTA.


USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, North Korea, New Zealand and Singapore already signed ACTA.

Mexico and Switzerland didn't want to sign the text. EU couldn't sign the text because this case never happend (who will sign the text in the name of the 27 member States?)

On the other hand, UK has been one of the worst State in the EU on this topic (filesharing, making isp become private police, etc.). Blair was a crazy puppy found of Bush. We though I might change with Cameron. Well, it didn't.

You missed the irony cause you probably don't know who Christian Engström is.


That said, if your MEP is Christian Engström, maybe you could bother another one?

That's what I did for the telecoms package. I called a dozen of MEP. Of course, they are less receptive when you tell them you don't vote for them. But
1/you don't have to tell them (they tend to forget that they are paid to serve general interest and not just to make sure they will be reelected)
2/when they speak with lobbies, they are less peaky about where they're from and
3/freedom deserves me trying that (it's just a bunch of phone calls, no harm done, and it's really efficient).

For more informations: http://www.laquadrature.net/en/acta
To act, see http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA

What CAN they do without stooping to low ethical levels?

Take 4chan over

French Data Network (FDN), the oldest French isp, fighting for an open Internet, Net neutrality, against HADOPI etc., also did it's share.

FDN opened an account dedicated. See : Internet Censorship in Egypt: a humble action from FDN

I confirm most of this story, except that I'm French, not German. ;-)

The way I see it, Nvu was a trademarked fork of [Mozilla|SeaMonkey] Composer: it's been designed in a way that made it incompatible with the Mozilla trunk, probably on purpose. The KompoZer project aims to backport most of the Nvu code to the Mozilla codebase — hence the upcoming merge with SeaMonkey.

KompoZer will remain a standalone app: it will be built on SeaMonkey 2.1, and SeaMonkey Composer should have most of KompoZer's features and bug-fixes.

-- Fabien Cazenave, KompoZer lead dev.

since 15th century, dutch speaking countries (low countries) have led the world in modern and visionary concepts, in areas ranging from humanism to trade. erasmus, spinoza and more. and now this ....

Actually, even if it's true that it's a modern way of considering file sharing, they are not the visionary leaders described here.

At least 2 existed :

• Nov 2007, a Canadian Government Commissioned Study
• Dec 2008, a Study led in Brittany (region of France)

both concluded that, the most common idea is that a file shared is a file that could have been bought, free file sharing doesn't impact file purchasing. Or more precisely : it doesn't kill file purchasing, it favours file purchasing.

A little note. From the article :

The European Council, led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, removed the amendment before passing the Telecom package.

Well not exactly.
First of all, this is the Council of the European Union, not the European Council. Everybody confuses them (and also with the Council of Europe, with is not related with European Union. Someone even mixed up with the European Commission some comments above). Some people argue that people make things hard (like similar names hard to remember), so that it's harder to fight (you can't fight what you don't understand).

Also, the Council wasn't led by Sarkozy, but by Luc Chatel, secretary of State for Consumer affairs and Industry. But it's true that nobody in the French government would have the guts to make Sarkozy unhappy on purpose. They are totally devoted to him. So incidentally we can indeed say that Sarkozy led the Council even if he wasn't here.

Laquadrature published something more accurate : Citizen safeguards striked out in EU Council

This means that there's now nothing stopping France's controversial 'three strikes' law from going into effect. What hope is there for a 'parliament' where near-unanimous agreement can be completely undone so easily?"

Woa, kinda alarmist, don't you think ?

The text hasn't been adopted yet. You can fin a nice diagram describing where we are in the current procedure. The step described in this article is the point #4=>#9. The next step will be #11. But first, there will be a tripartite meeting (Council + MEPs + commission) and probably a #10 as commission and council doesn't agree.

So there will be a second reading by the EP. So please stop saying that UE is a dictatorship. There are a lot of things to notice before we can say that :

• As you can see on the diagram 1/ there will be a second reading by the EP 2/whatever happens then, after the second reading by the council, the act cannot be adopted without EP approval (steps #15, #28 and #30).
• At any moment, the commission can change the text (or withdraw it).
• Remember that the two legislative chambers are composed by MEPs (elected), and by ministers (witch are named, this is true, but you elected the guy who names them).
• As a French, I can say that it's way much easier/friendlier to reach MEP, than member of my own national parliament. I can argue with them (and by them, in most case, I mean their assisants), I can know what they do, what they vote etc. For example : if I want to know who voted for 138, then I just wget the pdf from the EP webside, and I can see a list of names page 43 : http://quadrature.theocrite.org/results_of_roll_call_votes_20080924.pdf . This allows people to script the results and make it more user friendly, like this : http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Telecoms_package_directives_1st_reading_details_by_score . Pretty transparent for a dictatorship, isn't it ?

Again, nobody says that EU is perfect. Of course it isn't. But saying that "The EU is a great idea but the execution is terrible.", or other thing I read in the comments, seems disproportionated to me. It's probably due to the fact that the article was misleading and could be understood as "the act is adopted, and the amendment 138 voted by 88% of MEPs is dead".

Well no, it's not dead. And even worse, MEPs are really angry now. They told us that this amendment will be reintroduced during the next reading by the EP. But this amendment will be written differently. It will be stronger and totally focused on the 3-strike approach and the french law (HADOPI) with is being examined by the French Parliament and Senate.

For more info on this topic, you can subscribe to laquadrature's rss

Sorry for making a comment longer than I usually aimed to do and sorry for my poor English.

In case none of you know, the EU is pretty much a mislabeled dictatorship. Citizens of the EU have pretty much nothing to say about what goes on or who gets "elected" for this or that. Democracy, pah!

Eu is not the perfect democracy, we agree on this part. But saying it's a dictatorship where "Citizens [...]have pretty much nothing to say about [...] who gets "elected"", this is not true. The two legislative chambers are :

• The Council of the European Union, composed by the ministers of all EU countries. That's right you didn't vote for them, but you voted for a government that named them.
• The European Parliament composed by Euro-deputies elected by direct universal suffrage.

The EU is a very good idea gone horribly wrong.

That's Manichean. It's never a good idea to say "this is all {good,bad}". Some things are bad, some things are good. You speak like someone that lost everything.
EU isn't a lost cause. A lot of good things came from Europe. The fact that MEPs didn't vote for software patents back in 2005 (14 votes against 300+), the fact that MEPs adopted[1] the amendment 138 of the telecoms package (88% of MEPs votes !) and the commission accepted it[2], the fact that they adopted amendments aiming to reduce greenhouse gases (despite the huge lobbying of car manufacturers and oil vendors), etc. are all clues that EU can bring good things when people are watching.
Of course I'm not saying everything is wonderful, but I think that fixing what is broken is a better approach than just saying that EU is a dictatorship, let's burn all and start again from scratch.
I mean, we have to admit that even if it's not perfect, we have something working pretty good, and considering that to make one step, we have to please 27 different countries (used to be less, but it was still difficult), we can easily understand why it wasn't straight forward (We all know that many times, countries had important disagreements).

Media pay no attention to it either. What's going on in EU politics? You wont get it from the telly, the paper, or the generic news sites (though Obama is all over the place)...

That's partially true. classic media don't pay a lot of attention to Europa. That's probably the main problem, more important than the fact that people are elected or not. EU is too far from people. Nobody knows that EU makes that is good for them, but they always know what is bad for them. They even think that good things coming from EU are bad. Why ?
Well because EU is the best thing that happened to our national politicians. "I can't do this, see, EU voted that", "I'd like to please you, but I can't EU doesn't allow me to". This is the best excuse ever. So every time a politician screws up, he can say that's EU fault, thus making people hate it.
That's why we need to promote transparency (which is the subject on this article). We need to make EU closer to people. "Media pay no attention" ? Well, euronews speaks about it. Other media don't ? Well let's watch the good media then. Also we have to promote actions like La quadrature. Laquadrature watches EU when they vote something concerning freedom and internet. ffii watches EU when it's related to software patents, ACTA and so on. Very few people are watching them, it's true, but as long as few people keep watching them and alerts medias and citizen when needed, well there is still hope.

Give me the information and my 1/300m'th say in who our new EU overlords are, and I shall welcome them!

What is 1/300m ?
AFAIK, EU is 27 states and 500-M citizens.

[1] http://www.laquadrature.net/en/telecoms-package-european-democracys-victory-already-threatened
[2] http://www.laquadrature.net/en/commission-accepts-amendment-138-against-graduated-response