Lawmakers tend to notice, when those that are most inimical to these goals have their careers cut short by electoral defeat and are substituted for more friendly ones.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet_spread/?fpla

The reason SOPA/PIPA failed was that people who stopped paying attention a long time ago – got a wake up call and an education. They didn’t know about ACTA because no one talked about it, no one reported on it (“it’s complicated” BS!) and it doesn’t make good sound bite headlines.

But the reason the bills failed is because people learned about them. 800 million people who lead busy lives, are bombarded with messaging every second, who barely take the time to catch headlines once a day on the news – mom and pop in the midwest.

Crap, even most of the news anchor’s and ‘investigative’ journalist’s didn’t know about SOPA/PIPA until they went to look up something on the internet and kept running into black pages.

BTW – the MAFIAA did not put the most $ into lobbying for SOPA/PIPA passed. It was the cable companies, tv stations and satellite corporations. Third on the list were publishers (newspapers). They already OWN what “news” the public gets. I think that should be obvious.

There needs to be a concerted effort to get around these filters to make the case on HOW these bills affect every day life. Do people know about the new department going into effect this year (working with ISP’s) to start the 6 strikes and your out policy? ISP’s can throttle or toss subscribers out before the 6th strike.

Or that a feature in the TPP requires licensing of buffers – DVR, burners, streaming, etc. driving up the cost of hardware until it’s out of reach? Why don’t people know about TPP – or OPEN?

The internet took one step and it would not have been successful without the public.

Do not confuse the problems with the copyright monopoly, with the content. There’s no reason whatsoever to stop enjoying culture, just because there’s a problem with the copyright monopoly.

And there’s no correlation that makes the problems with the copyright monopoly go away, just because you stop consuming culture, that point in particular was addressed in the article.

> “It’s just wrong.”

Among most people, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying culture for free without privileging the copyright holder with any control over such free access to culture, and without privileging him with any right to a monetary compensation from such consumption, that norm in society was established over a 150 years ago.