Anti‐ ACTA Mobilizations

Abstract

The mobilization against the Anti‐Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was a transnational movement that led to the first ever rejection of a trade deal by the European Parliament after the expansion of its powers with the Lisbon treaty. Already in June 2011, the Mexican Senate rejected ACTA and later that same year mass mobilization erupted in the US against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The US movements, largely supported by Silicon Valley tech giants, led to a dramatic rise in the public salience of intellectual property legislation, which had been previously considered an obscure technical issue. Thus, by early 2012, European activists were strongly attuned to the problems with ACTA and drew attention to the nondemocratic and secretive way the agreement was negotiated, the undue influence of business lobbies, as well as to the threats it posed to privacy, free speech, and access to medicines, among others. Kader Arif, the European Parliament Rapporteur on ACTA, famously resigned claiming that the negotiations had been a “masquerade.” The anti‐ACTA campaign, taking off first in the notoriously “patient” Central and Eastern Europe, provided an emblematic example of a truly trans‐European mobilization. Crucially, it was a campaign in defense of internet freedom – the internet was perceived by campaigners not only as a tool for democracy but also as a democratic cause in itself.