A Copyright Masquerade: How Corporate Lobbying Threatens Online Freedoms

How can we protect the Internet and our right to free speech, when government strings are being pulled by corporate lobbyists with large legal teams and entertainment budgets?

A Copyright Masquerade reveals how proposals for Internet copyright enforcement stem from an American corporate agenda linking intellectual property to trade policy. It is an agenda that involves private industry asking government to block the Internet to protect commercial interests. Taking international and European examples – from the Wikileaks saga to the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) protests to Britain's Digital Economy Act - Horton peels back the paper on the political process to reveal the repeated pattern of governments trying to hide what they are doing and to fast-track the new copyright measures, precluding democratic debate. She also shows how, supported by a global system of policy surveillance, lobbyists for the entertainment industries are able to be sufficiently convincing that governments often don't even bother to question their rationale.

An essential and eye-opening exposé of the threat to online democracy in the digital era.