Members of the European Parliament and their assistants are participating in this year's Document Freedom Day, a 'grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general', according to an announcement on the organisation's website.

The reason that ACTA was negotiated in secret among rich countries was that this was seen as the most expeditious way of getting a super-extreme copyright agreement passed with a minimum of fuss, and that all the poor countries who were excluded from the negotiation would later be coerced into agreeing to it.

This post is about what I think we have to watch out after Cablegate. [...] A lot is at stake and if we do not want our children to live in an even more Orwellian society then already we do, we have to do something about it.

By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.

The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.

David Reyes Samblas Martinez is the founder of Spanish Copyleft Hardware store Tuxbrain, and attended the famous Open University of Catalunya. He’s also the subject of this month’s Fellowship interview, in which he answers questions on hardware manufacturing, e-learning and Free Software politics.

If the future is the information society, then software is the new "means of production", and free software offers the opportunity to regain for use by everyone without being controlled by a single entity.