Dateline Warsaw – Online protest and Generation 2.0

Presented by Peter Gentle

Welcome to Dateline Warsaw, where journalists chew over the top news stories in Poland and beyond. In the studio this week I have Dateline debutant, French news agency AFP’s Jonathan Fowler, Merger Market, FT Group's Aleksander Nowacki and the English Section’s head John Beauchamp.

This week an ACTA agreement special.

There has been one story which has dominated news this week in Poland and that is the Polish government signing the anti-counterfeit treaty agreement (ACTA) in Tokyo on Thursday. The signing came after DOS attacks on government web sites, the hacking into the Prime Minister’s Office web site and planting a video on the home page with a figure dressed as General Jaruzelski - who initiated martial law in Poland in 1981 - announcing the end of freedom on the internet as we know it.

The issues surrounding ACTA, and the US proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation, are many and don’t all include copyright in the digital file sharing age.

The Anonymous hacking group declared this week that “we are more powerful than governments…”. But who do Anonymous represent and are they more accountable than a democratically elected government?

Is a culture of entitlement emerging with a younger generation that expects everything to be free? Now!

Have Big Media been slow to adapt themselves to the internet?

And what about the closing down by the US of the Megaupload cyberlocker site this week, which is based not in the US but in Hong Kong. Should the FBI be able to shut down a site registered in China?

All that, and more, in Dateline Warsaw.