Leroux: Over here it hasn't been ratified yet and shortly before the announced protests the government put its plans to let it pass on hold. They probably will ratify and pass it though, and the media is doing its bit to back them up.

The thing I don't get is when the observation that a "contract is not acutely dangerous, only potentially dangerous" is interpreted as something like "it isn't all that bad, there's no harm in signing it, I guess". I can't believe how politicians can act so openly naive. Almost everything really bad once started as "potentially bad" only and ignorance helped to let it grow. This kind of attitude always reminds me of the famous quote from that French movie, "La Haine":

C'est l'histoire d'un homme
qui tombe d'un immeuble de 50 étages.
Au fur et à mesure de sa chute,
pour se rassurer, il se répète:

"Jusqu'ici, tout va bien."
"Jusqu'ici, tout va bien."
"Jusqu'ici, tout va bien."

Mais l'important, c'est pas la chute.
C'est l'atterrissage...

(Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!) :P

Leroux: ... is downplayed by the media, especially here in Germany?

The underlying message I get from reading newspapers and watching TV news is: It's just a bunch of pirates complaining about not being able to download free music and movies. If I had no idea what the internet was, I'd probably believe them that this new law is all for the better. Makes me kind of disappointed in the German press (when even Reporters Sans Frontières have spoken against ACTA). I don't expect them to take sides, but IMO they actually do, by overemphasizing the protesters supposed dislike of music and movie copyrights and downplaying the real issues with ACTA (high risk of a surveillance culture, undemocratic secret-mongering, lobbyism, loopholes etc.).

It's probably true that a lot of Anti-ACTA activists are uninfomed and hysterical, but that's the whole point: How can they be informed if the relevant information is withheld from the populace? This has been worked on in secret for years and was signed by many nations without most of their citizens ever hearing about it (and apparantly without the signers being fully informed about it themselbves)? Aren' t the refusal of the ACTA authors to share all relevant information and the absence of any political debate - even in the face of massive protests - reasons enough to be highly suspicious? I'd say better safe than sorry.

Just had to get this off my chest, sorry. Let the flaming begin. ;)

SimonG: As I said before, it's less binding than other, worse stuff we signed. It's funny how some critizism is actually pretty baseless. E.g. that the formulation is to "unclear" and not "detailed" enough. Well, guess what, that is the purpose of international contracts. They need to be made more concrete by the legislation because that is how democracy works. ACTA is not a law, it's a treaty.

It's a bad treaty, in purpose and implementation. But just that. A bad treaty along the lines of many bad treaties before it. It's actually nice to see people care, therefore it might have actually been good in making people look closer. Yet, it is more the general trend in that legislation that is disturbing, not the treaty itself.

hedwards: You do realize that in some parts of the world treaties are of more lasting importance than laws, right? I don't know about here in China, but back in the US, treaties are extremely hard to get out of, you pretty much have to sign a new agreement that the old one is no longer in force.

A law is simple enough to undo in most cases.

SimonG: A treaty is an act of the executive power. It need to be ratified by the legislative body of that country to come into legal effect for the citizens of that particular country. A parliament can deny ratification of a signed treaty. Then the country might have to "pay damages" or can be taken responsible before international courts (apart from big supranational organizations like EU or WTO this hardy ever happens).

It might feel that treaties have more lasting importance, because they are the more visible symbol of a long time government strategy, but in the end, it's the law that binds you. That is important on many level in a democracy, e.g. you can challenge a law as a citizen, but not a treaty. This, of course, if only true for democracies. In countries like China they don't give a rats ass about their people or a proper legal process. But China doesn't really care about international treaties either.

The EU however, is slighty different, they have "treaties" that can act directly as laws. But the EU also has their own democratically elected legislative body.