Since I’m currently back home in Vienna I went to the Anti ACTA demonstration yesterday, starting from Europaplatz, down the Mariahilferstraße and over the Ring to the Parliament. It was an almost warm Saturday in late February and at the same time similar demonstrations took place all over Austria and Europe. My guess is we were about 5000 to max. 7000 people, police say 3000, organisers say 10 000. The crowd was mostly young, quite a few school students, the mood may be described as cheerful anger if this makes any sense to you.
As you would expect there were quite a few people with Guy Fawkes masks and other internet and reddit memes. So what I found most interesting were the banner people had brought and here is a best of selection of my favourite ones:
ACTA = Stasi 2.0
A movie is not a car
ACTA ad Acta
.
System failure: Capitalism not working
System (I) Reset
.
Stopp ACTA
Sharing is not stealing
bekACTA Scheiss (= Shity Shit)
“Niemand hat die Absicht eine Mauer zu errichten.” (= “No one has any intention of building a wall.”)
ACTA Assholes Creating Tyranny Again
ACTA La Vista
.
Capitalism not working
End?
Yes No
Join the revolution.
.
Meine Freundin ist schwanger. Mein Provider wußte es vor mir. (= My girlfriend is pregnant. My provider knew it before I did.)
You can’t control 500 Million PPL w/o making a few enemies.
Yet the best one and the one that most demonstrators seemed to agree on was pretty short, a good one to shout as well:
FUCK ACTA
Expect us.
Update (29.02.12):
There were two more banner at the demonstration that I keep thinking of and that I have not mentioned here yet (I did not write down those in my notebook – at least in terms of meaning they should be accurately quoted):
Wenn ihr uns das Internet nehmt, nehmen wir euch eure Faxgeräte (= If you take away our internet, we’ll take away your fax machines)
Ignorant me I did not quite understand that one at first and so one of my friends who was there with me on Saturday enlightened me: apparently unfriendly politician’s fax machines are being served by activists with a pitch black piece of paper – that has been looped… Now that’s mean.
And last but not least there was this one, surely way too important to be forgotten!
Don’t take away my porn
Posted by vsworks 
