Public Address on ACTA: “How DARE they sell ordinary New Zealanders down the river?”
The population of countries negotiating ACTA is 1,178,504,491. The members of public with access to the text of ACTA: 42. Perhaps with this in mind PublicAddress.net features a well-timed editorial on ACTA 
today by Colin Jackson that’s well worth reading, “There is now no cost to distributing information. That’s not rhetoric – it’s an indisputable fact. It means that people who rely for their income on being a toll-gate on the flow of information don’t have a business model any more. Artists can still create and charge people for appreciating their work directly, but those who make their living from recycling imperfect copies of what others do are going to find it more and more difficult from now on. This is the context for the innocuously-named Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international treaty being negotiated by the governments of New Zealand, the EU, Canada, the US and a few other countries. Rumours have persisted for some time that [ACTA] is really about controlling copying on the Internet, as well as, or perhaps instead of, controlling the flood of fake Prada handbags and Rolex watches filling our shops. And rumours are what we have to rely on because no-one has seen the text of ACTA. The government officials negotiating it have told us that it’s far too commercially sensitive for the people it would affect to be able to actually see it before it’s all signed off by Obama, Gordon Brown or his successor and John Key.”
“We don’t have to think too hard to figure out which side of this debate will be employing lobbyists. The people who stand to lose from an attack on the Internet to prevent people copying things are ordinary folks, run of the mill Internet users, not just those who like to download copyrighted music and movies. The people want that attack on the Internet, because it is destroying their business models, are a handful of very well-resourced industry associations and big companies. The same people who claimed that the very existence of recorded music would cause human vocal chords to atrophy, or that the popularity of the VCR (remember those?) would be “as dangerous as the Boston Strangler was to a woman at home”.”
