Europeans will take to the streets this weekend in protest at the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international agreement that has given birth to an ocean full of red herrings.

That so many have spawned is, say critics, in no small part down to the way in which this most controversial of international agreements was drawn up. If the negotiating parties had set out to stoke the flames of Internet paranoia they could not have done a better job.

Accepted there are two things that should never be seen being made in public—laws and sausages—the ACTA process could be a case study of how not to do it. Conducted in secret, with little information shared except a few leaked documents, the ACTA talks were even decried by those who were involved in them.

That the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording Industry Association of America, had even a tangential role has done nothing to calm fears among opponents that the agreement is little more than a stitch up by rights holders against the interests of a free and open Internet.

According to Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, the problems with the agreement appeared at the start of the process, when too many things were swept under the ACTA umbrella.