http://www.stopacta.info/

I am curious as to what you guys think about ACTA in compare to SOPA.

It is worth reading up on since the people making this WORLD LAW are not even voted into their positions.

USA and a large number of EUROPEAN countries has already signed this law, giving internet providers the extra job to police their users on the internet.

Acta has been a pretty big deal in sweden at least, though i have to admit i havent read up a lot on it anyway.

I followed whatever info I could get on this back in 2009-2010, then the information flow stopped so I assumed the project was dead. Apparently I was wrong and the change has been living under even a bigger pile of rocks than it was before.

This is another one of those laws which use flawed argumentation to push the guilt of piracy to people who are not responsible, while having tremendous and harmful side effects.

The same analogy applies to this as applied to SOPA; you really can't blame car manufacturers for drunk driving, or expect them to stop making cars because there is drunk driving, or expect them to police drunk drivers. It just makes zero sense whatsoever.

Moreover, if you hold ISPs guilty of crimes their customers do, the ISPs have no choice but to block pretty much everything. Or go out of business.

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www.ceekayed.com

SOPA and ACTA just proves to me that the whole wide world political process is broken!
It is hard to make meaningful laws for something well ahead of its time.
The Internet is a fast global communication and distribution of information system that outperforms any other global systems we have in place today. How can we even think that we can make a decent law to govern the Internet when we cannot even agree on a decent global system for anything else? If only we would focus on creating a decent world system uniting all countries into one entity, but no; - we are centuries away from such a globalization and yet The Internet exists as such an entity!
I do not believe they actually want to unite us. Individual power thrive on diversity and conflict of interest; I therefore doubt newer generations will find any positive way of solving this issue on the Internet and one day a rule or law such as SOPA or ACTA will be put into action, which I do not believe will make a difference anyhow.

Basically I want to ask: "Why are these laws even worth our time?"

They are not. The problem just lies in that since the internet is a completely new thing, most of the people in power don't really understand it at all, which makes them easy targets for corporate scammers (lobbyists) to take advantage of.

See, when there's a thing you know NOTHING about and some "expert" comes to tell you that there's a problem with the thing, which could be solved by doing <x>, you tend to believe it all to be true. Why would you question his claims? Afterall, he's an expert and you know nothing.

But that only works until someone tells you that the "expert" is just trying to scam you and that you should do <y> instead. Only then will you doubt anything. That is also exactly why all negotiations concerning these laws are run in secrecy.

Also, many people feel that an unregulated flow of information is essentially just a form of anarchy, and that flow should be stopped anyway.

You're also correct we'd never be able to come up with laws that would actually successfully police the internet without making it completely unusable for anyone BUT criminals. This is also another concept people have problems grasping for some reason;

Laws are made to police society and make it act under common norms. Criminals break laws.

More laws =/= less criminals.
More laws = more laws are being broken.

Replace the word "laws" from the last chapter with "vases", or "cars". See what I did thar?

On an addition, it makes feel sick how the people in power have not yet realized that laws should be never made to benefit any entity financially. You just can't do it in a system where corporations' (and partly even individuals') sole purpose is to gather wealth by any lawful means necessary. See what I did thar again?
Corporations are not conscious beings whom would make decisions based on the greater good, and expecting corporate advisors to give any other advice than that which benefits them directly or undirectly is just absurd.

So, as with 95% of world's problems, it comes down to pure ignorance, greed and arrogancy. It's a really bad combination when we live in a system that actually rewards the greed.

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www.ceekayed.com

We got about half a year till we vote on it. It will be interesting to see if anyone organizes to pull it down as we saw with SOPA.

Regarding this whole debate the supreme court in Sweden yesterday decided not to try a verdict against people behind the Pirate Bay. One of those convicted was the ISP where the legal argument was something to the point that ISPs are responsible when there is such a large volume of illegal activities that they cannot claim they are unaware of.
Since the legal battle is now more or less lost for "the pirates" (We have a "pirate" political party in sweden) they are now turning more to politics. The basic argument is somewhat similar to what Ceek implies above, ie that a law that isnt considered fair by large parts of the population cannot be sustained for long since it isnt a "common norm". Somewhere around 20-25% (less according to some, but still a very substantial proportion) of the Swedish population apparently make use of illegal downloads, and among young people it is likely a considerably higher number.