[hastur]

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.

[skrebbel]

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.

[hastur]

Obviously, Bits Of Freedom didn't bother to do much about ACTA.

[rickmb]

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).

[toyg]

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.

[hastur]

Yeah, but who hears Cory Doctorow, when he writes on his blog, which is read only by geeks.

The problem is breaking through to the wider public, to the mainstream media. We managed to do that in Poland.