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European Parliament pushes back on ACTA
Swedish MEP Christian Engström reports
that the European Parliament has passed a
resolution coming out against the secretive ACTA copyright treaty
negotiations and demanding transparency in the process. The vote was
rather definitive: 633 for, 13 against. "At last, the elected
representatives in the parliament have sent a strong message. We have shown
that we do not accept secrecy. We have shown that we are prepared to stand
up for a free internet open to everybody."
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European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 14:29 UTC (Wed) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]
Let's see what happens.
This is non-legislative anyway, and the devil will be in the substance of the
European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 17:16 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Even though it's non-legislative, it's a good signal. I wish the spineless cowards in charge here (Canada) had the guts to do something similar. Oh, wait... they're not spineless. They're just owned by corporate lobbyists.
European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 18:09 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] The EU has a reasonably good parliament, just like the USA has a reasonably good Constitution, but in each case the real power lies in another body that has little regard for the public interest. In this case, the main power is in the hands of the EU's negociator, and from the leaked draft, we can see that he's pushing for a completely anti-citizen set of requirements: the March 1st leaked draft. In the second link from the story, the guy on the far left of the photo is Erik Josefsson - the most effective lobbyist for our side back in the major anti-swpat campaigning of 2004-2005. Great to see he's involved.
European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 18:47 UTC (Wed) by sumC (subscriber, #1262) [Link]
Don't want to nitpick but I think you mean Congress and not Constitution.
European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 23:12 UTC (Wed) by shmget (subscriber, #58347) [Link]
I'm pretty sure he meant 'Constitution', since no sane person would qualify the US Congress as 'pretty good'.
European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 23:46 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] The current 'approval rating' of Congress sits at about 24% right now. As done through (largely worthless) phone polls. Margin of error is estimated at +/-4 points by the poll takers.When queried about how crooked they thought Congress was most people (55%) said that 'quite a few' were crooked. So if that is correct then everything is now pretty much ran on a toxic mixture of taxes and apathy. I don't know how accurate that is, but all in all it's not good. If the Europeans don't immediately steer clear of any and all 'intellectual property' related treaties coming out of our country then they are as crooked as my government is. On a related note: One of the ways to side-step around the limits placed on the USA government by the constitution is through international treaty. It can't really trump constitution law, if I understand things, but it's one of the very easy ways to get laws passed without having to do much voting on it. Our USA DMCA laws exist to enforce the "WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act" . DMCA is two parts... one is the changes to copyright law (mixed bag) and the second is the anti-circumvention stuff (all bad). The first part of the DMCA is based on "Universal Copyright Convention" (1952), "Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms" (1971), "Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works" 1886, part of "Uruguay Round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)" 1997, and a bunch of other stuff. So it's very likely that ACTA is not just a attempt to screw over everybody in Europe. It's probably also designed to add a bunch of new laws for USA citizens to enjoy, too.
Summarised by a negotiator Posted Mar 11, 2010 0:26 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
The European Commissioner for in charge of ACTA, Karel De Gucht, summarised it quite well. Of course, he was trying to sell it, so he said:
"it will provide our innovators increased protection in overseas markets"
This is interesting because no form of the word "innovation" or "innovator" exists in the leaked draft. So he means "holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks".
"Protection" means we can rely on the overseas court system supporting us. I feel empowered already!
But, "overseas" works in both directions.
So, his summary was in fact: it will provide overseas holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks increased power to use our local court system against you here.
Thanks European Commission!
European Parliament pushes back on ACTA Posted Mar 10, 2010 19:15 UTC (Wed) by rks (guest, #55908) [Link]
Please note that the rights of the European Parliament have been greatly expanded recently with the Lisbon Treaty.
Christian Engström's a pirate Posted Mar 11, 2010 7:40 UTC (Thu) by emilv (guest, #60467) [Link]
Note that Christian Engström is part of the Swedish Pirate Party. He was elected to the EU parliament by the Swedish people. It will be interesting to see how well the pirates perform in the Swedish parliament election this fall.
This is exactly the type of questions that the Pirate Party are working with: freedom of information.
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