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ast week was a good week for those who believe in the internet and culture, with the rejection of ACTA being a key moment in Europe, on par with the rejection of SOPA in the US six months earlier. Of course, as we saw with the defeat of SOPA, a number of ACTA supporters who haven’t come to terms with why the public was so upset are lashing out. One of the more outspoken responses against the EU Parliament’s decision came from Ewan Morrison for The Guardian, in a piece that I honestly read over a few times to make sure it wasn’t satire. I don’t think there’s a single truly accurate statement in the entire thing. It sets the bar of misinformation so high that I think from now on I will compare any clueless article to the newly developed Ewan Morrison scale of wrongness, with this column scoring a perfect 10 out of 10. Let’s explore why.

The headline defines the kind of malarkey we’re in for, stating: Throwing out Acta will not bring a free internet, but cultural disaster.

Really? So blocking an agreement that ratchets up copyright enforcement marginally, and which might criminalize a few things that are widely accepted in the public, means we’re headed for cultural disaster? How so? Morrison never bothers to tell us. He makes no reference, whatsoever, to anything that’s actually in ACTA, but seems to merely assume that ACTA would have magically made piracy go away and sent people back to buying CDs and DVDs… and even paying for news again. Clearly he has never read ACTA. Many of our concerns about ACTA weren’t in what it would directly do, but in how it would set new floors that meant today’s problems in copyright law couldn’t be fixed going forward. There were also issues of vague definitions that we were afraid would be used overly broadly (“commercial scale” for example), but that wouldn’t have changed the basic issues Morrison seems concerned with.

History is strewn with moments when politicians made swift decisions that led to disastrous consequences. One such moment has just occurred. In throwing out the Acta (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) bill on Wednesday, MEPs in the European parliament have unwittingly signed their countries up for a future in which internet piracy will lead to the decline of film, the novel, journalism and music on an industrial scale.

This is pretty funny, in that this was actually quite the opposite of a “swift decision.” Copyright expansion, on the other hand, has a long history of government officials pushing for “swift decisions” that expand copyright law, without giving anyone any actual economic evidence that it’s needed, or explaining any logical rationale. This is an issue that goes back centuries. Copyright expansion is always rushed through. We almost never see thoughtful debate on the issue. Instead, the rejection of ACTA was quite the opposite. It was a case where the public spoke up, and many MEPs actually took the time to inform themselves of the details and realized that ACTA is not a path forward. In fact, many MEPs changed their minds on the issue over the last six months as more data and evidence was presented to them. That’s the exact opposite of what Morrison claims happened.

This is not scaremongering. One need only look at the stats from the US, where during the Clinton administration the internet companies were given free rein to pillage copyright material via the rushed-through Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).