ACTA and SOPA

The world can be grateful that the intellectual property lobby employs too many lobbyists and too few strategists. Lobbyists are salespeople, the sell potential clients or employers amazing things, international agreements, Directives, the ability to stop time and enjoy old business models with no need for innovation or creativity, they sell smoke and mirrors. It was this approach that led to the proposal of SOPA in the United States and ACTA in Europe and beyond. It is this short-sightedness that has helped inspire the massive anti-IP movement that brought untold thousands of citizens onto the streets of Europe on the cold February day that will be seen, we hope, as the day that helped preserve our online freedom.

From the European content industry, ACTA was all cost and no potential benefit. However, as always, it was dragged along by multinational, mainly US lobbies that promise the world but could never deliver. The component parts of ACTA were coming, the content industry just needed to stay silent and wait. The European Commission was about to launch a criminal sanctions Directive. The EU was planning to review the profoundly broken IPR Enforcement Directive (IPRED), which many rightsholders were targeting as a means of further strengthening European repressive policies in the internet environment. The Commission had a whole queue of enforcement measures in the style of ACTA's Article 27.3 either already in place or planned. All that the European copyright industry needed was for to avoid public attention for these plans. And then came ACTA.

Thanks to SOPA, European citizens better understood the dangers of ACTA. Thanks to the anti-ACTA campaign, it would be politically crazy for the Commission to launch the criminal sanctions Directive. Thanks to ACTA, there now is broad understanding of just how bad IPRED really is.

Yet, we must remain vigilant. The danger is not over. The EU Commission has already announced they'll ignore the Parliament's rejection of ACTA.