ACTA: Why was this allowed to happen?

Money. It’s ALL money.
The bills were written by entertainment industry lobbyists, and they’re buying the votes all over the US and EU to make it go through.

It’s so brazen that that twitwaffle Chris Dodd publicly threatened Obama that the industry would defund their contributions to his campaign for going against them.

I’ve seen some arguments say that SOPA and PIPA were somewhat a cover act, a distraction, to allow ACTA to go through with relative ease.

@King_Pariah Well it certainly took me by surprise… I can’t quite believe it’s been “around” for almost a year now.

@sinscriven I couldn’t quite believe that when I heard of it. I’m hoping that enough people of “influential status” will act against it all but still, that it’s gotten as far as it has is a little frightening to me.

Why does the scope of ACTA contain generic medicines (according to the wiki page)? Something smells like pharmaceutical lobbyists at work.

@PhiNotPi I guess that’s to do with the manufacture and sale of counterfeit medicines or something. In terms of stopping the sale of things that can seriously harm peoples’ health (which I’m sure counterfeit medicines can and probably do) it seems like ACTA’s a decent enough idea; it’s when it gets into the copyright infringement stuff it starts getting a bit… bleh.

A lot of it happened behind the scenes, and many of the people involved still aren’t allowed to talk about it. Also, “normal” people don’t care that much about privacy.

@PhiNotPi When it comes to issues like this the pharmaceutical industry is always involved, they spend a lot of time and money on developing medicine, so they want to be the only ones able to produce it.