ACTA update III: We are winning!

ACTA protest in Slovenia

 

The power of the Internet community is manifesting itself again as several European countries have started backtracking on the ACTA ratification process. In the latest news, Germany has announced that it won’t be signing the treaty for the time being. Germany is one of the five EU countries yet to sign, and naturally as an economic superpower it holds the key to the whole ratification process within the EU. Earlier, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Latvia have also put the treaty on hold. If the EU drops out of ACTA, which is looking more and more likely by the day, that will probably mean death for the whole treaty as Rick Falkvinge points out.

Therefore, now is the time to give the treaty the final push over the cliff! Tomorrow, on Saturday, February 11, people will be marching against ACTA in hundreds of cities across Europe. On Facebook, almost 400 thousand people have already signed up for the protests. It’s particularly interesting to see Eastern Europeans taking the streets in such large numbers. In fact, Eastern Europe has been at the frontlines of the whole anti-ACTA movement from the beginning. In some countries, ACTA protests represent the largest street actions since the fall of communism. That just goes on to show what the freedom of the Internet means to the people in these countries where a free press is still a rather recent phenomenon. We who are living in the complacent West would be well adviced to take cue on how to stand up for our right to exchange information before it’s taken away from us.

List of the protests in Europe:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AolqWqLcyaGadC1OS19vakFUY21ITjNHS1BxWU4wOVE&type=view&gid=0&f=true&sortcolid=-1&sortasc=true&rowsperpage=1000