Photo-reportage/ Comment
Today Valletta (Malta) joined a over 200 cities around Europe in a protest against a totally draconian anti-piracy treaty that is being proposed – ACTA.
The protests finally seem to be working, and even though the European Union has already signed the treaty, now the European Parliament and the individual countries in the Union each have a decision to take. Protests in some of the countries that had originally intended to sign the treaty have started making some inroads. Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Germany have all put their decisions on hold.
The Maltese Prime Minister, Lawrence Gonzi, also reacted today by stating that he wants to draw up a bill to protect people’s rights to use the Internet. Whether that means ACTA will not be ratified locally, however, remains to be seen.
The biggest argument against ACTA (and one which I fully support) is that it wants to impose old-fashioned business models on a world which has moved on significantly.
What really frustrated me today was the attitude of Moviment Graffiti – who were some of the main movers behind the protest. When they got the chance to speak that essentially implied that we should have the right to piracy. The person speaking on their behalf then went into a tirade against big corporations and insisted that we should boycott them. This is absolutely not what the protest should have been about, and I really felt cheated.
By making such sweeping statements and twisting the protest in favour of their beliefs really took away importance from the issue at hand – ACTA. By implying that we should have the right to steal material under copyright, they undermined the values of the protest and gave ACTA a solid base for its argument.
Thankfully all the other people who presented their views on behalf of the various organisations being represented made a lot of sense and the majority of people speaking presented a valid argument against ACTA.
All we can do now is maintain our protests online and pray that more governments see the light and stop this treaty in its tracks.
Pictures after the break.
More speakers:
(#42 of 366 X 2012 project)
This is disgraceful – we have no integrity at all. First we recruit people to fight for a cause – then we twist the argument or drop the cause before all points have been addressed. I suspected that some might be fighting to keep their right to cheat but the majority of the participants are well intended and although they are against piracy they will not allow the freedom on the internet to be infringed upon by ACTA – nothing is easy to overcome. We just have to find a better solution and harsher punishment for all those using the internet to pirate..