It should still be known, that a lot of bad stuff has crept into EU law. But people are starting to gain awareness on these issues. And East EU people have no enthusiasm about reliving the Iron Curtain days.
And for good reasons. I'm Romanian myself, but I think I speak for a lot of other East-Europeans when I'm saying that all this censorship non-sense brings back awful things from the past. I was only 9 when the Communist regime fell, but I can still remember about how my parents or any other adults could have gone to jail only for listening to Radio Free Europe. As long as people who remember those times are still alive and active stupid stuff like ACTA will hopefully not pass.
I think people from the former Soviet group are more attuned to abuses of power and attempts at censorship or rights abuse. As an example, I know my detectors went off full-scale when I saw the media coverage of the last Iraqi war on US television. Tightly cropped shots, showing only soldiers and their equipment -> obvious manipulation. And yet few other people around me noticed this.
The attitude in most of the other countries is one where people can't seem to give away their hard won right to privacy fast enough.
Dziekuje Bardzo to you. & Multumesc to gp.
I think Thomas Jefferson was spot on when he said that we need some kind of mass rebellion every 20 years just to keep the Governments in check, and remind them that they are there to serve us, not to control us:
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Maybe the reason Americans have so blindly fallen for the politicians' lies over the past 10 years and accepted to let them remove their Constitutional rights (or simply ignore them), is because Americans don't really know what it means to lose your liberty, so they don't act as they fade away, until it's really obvious that they have no more liberties (and too late).
The web has quickly become a main culture-driving force. As long as an open information environment exists, our global culture has the capacity to enter an Age of Reason where tactics of oppression and manipulation in the past will rarely be revisited.
Making thinkers more proactive is the chief concern, though. Too often, they will philosophize until their tongues almost fall off, but when it comes to preventing future infringements upon their rights, they just assume they will be fine. Next thing they know, someone's cut off their tongue, and they are rendered speechless.
Ironic that they are "worried" about "government control" given how often their governments control huge chunks of the economy, private sector and the general distrust and vilification of capitalism (you think the OWS is bad, wait till you hear the ex-commies and philosophy professors talking about social justice to the plebs, these guys are in the government here). It's more about them being pissed off about piracy prevention which is common not only for personal use but also in businesses.
Because it appears that privacy and opposition to censorship are at the core of opposition not "right to pirate stuff".
If I rememebr well, in Romania, most of the right-wing economic measures were taken in early 2000 by the... Socialist Party.
I'll just give you my country's example, Romania. Our biggest company, Petrom (it's an oil company) has been privatized just before our entry into the EU. Its new owner? The Austrians from OMV, which has the Austrian Government as its main shareholder. Also, there are only 2 or 3 Romanian banks, which I don't think that control more than 10% of the market taken together, the rest of the banking sector is controlled by foreign-owned banks (some of them also having their Governments as major shareholders). And I could go on and on.
I can give an example very close to home about gov't influence here in Hungary, and that is the tech/IT sector. A huge chunk of tech/IT SMBs are directly or indirectly living off government contracts, grants, gov't companies or companies that have been privatized but retain close ties to the gov't (and are dumb). A new thing here in Hungary is EU grants, which is the same, dumb money.
The first question I routinely get as an entrepreneur is "what grant did you win?". When I say "none" and that I'm trying to bootstrap off the market they think I'm crazy or lying. (Not kidding.) Also, most SMBs that I've come in contact with over over the last 3-5 years fit the above description well.
Without going into the details of the problems with money from the gov't or the EU, this effect precludes any kind of real R&D or innovation to take place around here. In fact the word "innovation" has been hijacked here in Hungary to mean "grant money". You have gov't officials saying "there's a lot of innovation in the IT sector" which means "there's a lot of grant money given out in the IT sector". Unfortunately there are no results to show for it, it's a cargo cult culture. The succesfull tech companies we do have (LogMeIn, Prezi, IndexTools, Graphisoft) are all companies that to my knowledge stayed the hell away from gov't money.
And the PM wonders why his country signed ACTA. It is not practically sovereign, that's why.