Gosh, we sure do love us some protest­ing action in the city. For last weeks “Stop A.C.T.A” demon­stra­tions, which were held pretty much world wide (I can’t be bummed to look it up, but let’s just exag­ger­ate the num­bers for the cause), lovely Maria joined the masses to protest one of the most con­tro­ver­sial laws to be put in place by the EU. In short: ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agree­ment, is sup­posed to give states and com­pan­ies more (inter­na­tional) con­trol over coun­ter­feit goods (which also includes copy­righted pir­ated digital files). But most crit­ics and young people fear that the law will lead to an abuse of power, that it under­mines their digital and human rights. There­fore, just as most EU-members were put­ting their sig­na­tures down on the law, people decided to organ­ize protests. Ber­lin surely wasn’t excluded from that dev­il­ish plan.

Of course, as fun and great as those party­ing protests are, we should remem­ber that we’re all some­how involved. This is our online life, our plat­forms, and our right to say whatever we want to say. Tak­ing part in demon­stra­tions like that show that young people, includ­ing Ber­liners, care about their coun­try and their way of life. Let’s keep it that way and con­tinue protest­ing where it’s needed.

(That said, I do per­son­ally think that there should be a new law pro­tect­ing artists and busi­nesses from being taken advant­age of, i.e. from online pir­acy. I just don’t believe that ACTA or the US-equivalent PIPA and SOPA are the bills that we need).

Cheers to Maria for the pictures!