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Europe To Block ACTA Disconnect Provisions
superglaze writes "The European Commission is 'not supporting and will not accept' any attempt to have ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) force countries to disconnect people for downloading copyrighted material, a spokesman for the new EU trade commissioner has said. All the signs are that the new commission, which took office earlier this month, intends to take a hard-line stance against US proposals for a filesharing-related disconnection system. 'Three strikes' is allowed in EU countries, but not mandated by the European government itself, and it looks like the new administration wants to keep it that way. From trade commission spokesman John Clancy, quoted in ZDNet UK's article: '[Ac ta] has never been about pursuing infringements by an individual who has a couple of pirated songs on their music player. For several years, the debate has been about what is "commercial scale" [piracy]. EU legislation has left it to each country to define what a commercial scale is and this flexibility should be kept in ACTA.'"
No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
Let he who is without copyright infringement cast the first takedown notice.
Something is wrong with the way we keep using the phrase "downloading copyrighted material" like it implies something illegal is going on.
The Linux kernel is copyrighted. Me downloading it is not illegal.
If I buy a book for my Kindle and download it, that's not illegal either.
But they are examples of downloading copyrighted material.
There needs to be a language adjustment such that we use "illegally downloading copyrighted material" instead.