your article is being referenced in this Register article.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/acta_draft_issued/

The point being the link between this article and "Lizard paranoia" means obviously the author has priveliged access to the minutes of the Bilderberg Group for the last ten years. Shame he disabled comments on it or i would have asked him to share.

Changes copyright law back to 14 years as originally intended. And promotes fair use?

One note for clarification: Yes, nutty American Protestants do tend to support laws against gambling, and may have done so in regards to the U.S. outlawing on-line gambling, but if they're so powerful how do you explain almost every city of any size in the U.S. having a gambling industry?

What was a far more important driver for the U.S. to outlaw Internet gambling was that large U.S. gambling casinos and companies did not have a piece of this large and growing enterprise, so they lobbied (bribed) the U.S. Congress into outlawing it. It will remain illegal only until U.S. gambling companies have their own on-line presence. Follow the money.

Yes, and let's not forget the uexpected and undeserved punishment unrelated industries took in the form of trade concessions the U.S. was forced to make worldwide when it determined petulantly to remove gambling from the GATS agmt!

These are incisive, well-considered comments regarding the trump FX of trade agmts, and I am a great fan of young Kembrew Mcleod, the author of Overzealous Copyright Bozos, who relayed the story of Electronic Frontier's successful intervention to prevent Woody Guthrie's 'estate' from claiming copyright over a folk song that was written collectively in the great folk tradition! ... But you've missed one important aspect of trade agmts, and it proved the key to Antigua's bad beat over the online gambling decision:

Politicians like trade agmts b/c it puts them in the int'l spotlight and so on, but remember that these things are often only as effective as the municipal or domestic legislation that gives them EFFECT. Shortly after Antigua's second victory, this time at the appellate level, the U.S. claimed that it had never intended gambling to be included in the agmt and that even if it had, hey, presto! Here is the UIGEA or Prohibition 2.0, which along with a series of selective, extra-territorial prosecutions, effectively killed much of that industry.

So clearly domestic legislation is not w/o considerable power.

Although I too dislike ACTA and think the proceedings around it are outrageous beyond belief I must say that if that 'leaked' draft is correct that the US is even worse off than the europeans since the EU at least at some point injected the wording 'reasonable' here and there and such instead of the US fixed no-discussion attitude.
However the EU also put in some things that are very conveniently open for interpretation, which means the politicians could solidify it in a way that's nicer than the US version but they'd also have the freedom to move to the other side and get even nastier (typical european to go for the vagueness and by doing so also nicely enables them to take bribes, oops I mean 'incentive packages')

But all that should not matter since the whole thing should be rejected outright, hell - even if it was great it should be rejected by principle because it was drafted in a most undemocratic nasty way for purposes that are also not serving the people.

The use of international agreements to further a single corporation has already proven to be a successful strategy, re: Microsoft and the "MSOOXML document standard" that was pushed through ISO. This was apparently done -- as the ACTA will also no doubt be done -- with the aid of lots of "financial lubricant".

This is where democracy falls on its face, and where manipulated citizens must take a stand. Capitalism should not -- and must not -- trump democracy. Shrugging your shoulders and acting helpless is not an option. When citizens are treated as criminals, when their right to privacy and fair representation is taken away, that is when people must act. Is your freedom less important than paying to watch the latest escapist movie in a theater or on your TV or iPad? Think about it (but not for too long...).