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European Parliament All But Rejects ACTA
An anonymous reader writes "European Parliament today adopted Written Declaration 12/2010 which basically tells the Commission to all but drop the negotiations. From the article: 'Citizens from all around Europe helped to raise awareness about ACTA among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) by collecting, one by one, more than 369 [of the MEPs'] signatures. With Written Declaration 12/20103, the European Parliament as a whole takes a firm position to oppose the un-democratic process of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and its content harmful to fundamental freedoms and the Internet ecosystem.'"
EU has been impressing me lately. They seem to actually care about good governance sometimes. That's one hell of a lot more than I can say about the USA and the "land of the free".
Now that we know where Paradise is, when do we leave?
Really? They couldn't be bothered to count more than 369 signatures?
Slagborr
A democratic institution representing the desires and best interests of it's electorate?
What gives?
unilateral declarations that work out to "agree with our stance on copyrig^H^H^Hcounterfeiting or else."
Now that the EU has "all but rejected ACTA", how likely is this to impact the enactment of this blatantly evil trade agreement in the US of A? Speaking as a concerned citizen of the US, can I breathe a little easier now, or is there more that still needs to be done to grind this horrible blight on the internet out of existence?
You should turn signatures off.
RTF summary. 369 signatures from the Members of the European Parliament. In other words, a majority.
Now all we can hope is that the US government decides its a bad idea as well. And while I'm wishing for the impossible - I'd like a solar powered corvette and world peace.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
The 369 signatories (377 now) are all MEPs (members of the European Parliament). 369 is significant because it is a majority of the eligible votes.
The linked page is just one of the relevant pages - you have to follow the links on the left to get at the rest. Here's a couple of interesting pages:
http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Written_Declaration_12/2010_signatories_list
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/ACTA
Can we get a better source than a wiki page that anyone can edit and was last updated on March 8th?
Now that Europe has more or less said FU to ACTA, can/will Canada and Mexico drop it too?
That's what I was going to say!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
He is popular, but his adversary is almost as popular as he is. But that's why the first guy won, and the second didn't.
Officially, negotiations are ongoing. In reality, the majority of those that would vote on it have pledged to vote no, if true, ACTA will never go though and become law. So the issue is 'all but dropped' in that the negotiations are still open, but no one on either side expects them to go anywhere.
WTF does "all but drop" mean? If you look at it grammatically, it means "to do everything but drop", which is the opposite of what the submitter implied.
"All But Rejects" in the headline indicated to me that the European Parliament had expressed its disapproval in every way short of a formal final rejection.
As a European I am glad to read this. However, I am no sure if this is over yet. The cynic in me says: there wasn't enough money flowing to some representatives or some representatives want to advance their own agenda a little bit more. I guess it is time to negotiate behind closed doors a little bit more until we reach an agreement.
My understanding of it is that they object strongly to ACTA but have not formally moved to reject it. They probably have to go through months of bureaucratic nonsense to get to the point of agreeing to it only if big changes are made, at which point one hopes the global opposition is so strong that ACTA simply fails in its objective. On the other hand, at the end of a few month wrangling they may agree to a differently worded version of ACTA. Can't say I'm the least bit convinced that ACTA is anywhere near on its last legs though I wish it were so.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
A big THANK YOU to all the MEP's who signed this. Way to grow a spine. Let's all hope ACTA dies the brutal death it was always destined for.
Unfortunately, the EU Parliament is a pitiful powerless entity and "Written Declarations" are just words without substance. The EU Parliament site describes what a Written Declaration is: (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/activities/plenary/writtenDecl.do)
"A written declaration is a text of a maximum of 200 words on a matter falling within the European Union's sphere of activities.
Written declarations are printed in all the official languages, distributed and entered in a register.
MEPs can use written declarations to launch or relaunch a debate on a subject that comes within the EU's remit."
Nothing to see here my friends, the real power stays with the EU Commission.
I had to look it up to, it seems to be correct English:
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/all+but
Read, refresh, repeat.
What's dishonest about it?
It's more than half of the people, so it's the majority. Not an overwhelming majority, yet still.
And in places where voters can/have to choose between more than 2 candidates (that is: almost everywhere except the US), candidates who get an actual majority of 50+% instead of only a relative majority are considered popular.
In general, "all but foo" means that everything foo-like has happened, short of foo itself. In this case, it means that ACTA hasn't been officially dropped, but it might as well have been because everything up to (but not including) its formal abandonment has taken place.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Reading the text, I'm worried that the European Commission will be able to argue that the current process is already complying with those demands.
There's a lot of "You can't do X unless it complies with existing EU law!" or "This better not have side effect X!" - to which the European Commission could say "Ok, we're already obliged to comply with EU law, so that changes nothing, and of course we've no intention to cause side effects, so let's continue and sign this thing.".
I'd love to see a document showing what sentences of the latest leaked draft are unavoidably shot down by this declaration.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Now let's all just watch the commission ignore the requests of the parliament. Unless it's really not important at all, of course.
Power in the EU is not with the parliament, but with the commission. Even after the treaty both executive and legislative power remains with the commission, and they threw in a part of the judiciary to match.
Well, they haven't pledged to vote 'no' just made a vague list of demands and expressed quite a lot of reservations.
Sadly, I don't think it means that much. The EU Parliaments has expressed skepticism of ACTA earlier, without any reaction. It would not be the first time the Commission tried to goad the Parliament into accepting draconian IP laws, if you remember their attempt at legalizing software patents. They withdrew the proposed directive after the Parliament amended it to something most of the anti-SW-patent crowd could live with (In other words: A reasonable deal). Total disrespect for the directly-elected representatives.
There's no shortage of socialist or nanny actions in Europe, nor bad policing although I lean towards incompetence there and not plain fascism. We steer clear of some of the problems that exist in the US, but there are still countless similarities to our parts of the world.
You've got Mexifornia, we've got Eurabia. You complain about taxation? Try Europe, it's no fun here either. You complain about No Child Left Behind, we struggle with declining education as well. Compared to your ghetto's our problematic neighbourhoods might seem decent, but we too face severe disparities in living standards and safety levels in certain environments as well. We might be a bit more relaxed about softdrugs, televised breasts or people claiming to be atheist, but we have no shortage of conservative and/or religious people up to the highest levels of government trying to ban whatever they can and they succeed often when it coincides with the goals of nanny state socialists. And plenty of celebrities and non-celebrities doing the complete opposite. Extremist nutcrackers, from just plain weird to dangerous to society? Check, we both have plenty.
Or the short version: we've never diverged that much with regards to freedom and opportunity. And as continent with relatively many and quite fluent speakers of English, I don't think we soon will. We can speak the same language and therefore our interchange of ideas is excellent. The only reason we seem to think we're so different is because we're so close that we take the similarities for granted.
I wrote that the Commission withdrew the proposed directive. Seems I misremembered. What happened was that they changed the directive to a 'compromise' version that basically threw out all the amendment, and it ended up getting rejected.
Point still stands anyway, the Council dumped all over parliament on the SW patent thing, and I've no reason to believe they'll do differently now.
No. It's a style form and it means they have upgraded the dropping XP path to the max, all they haven't done is actually drop it. If someone all but kills you, you're still alive. But you're also in a puddle of mud on intensive care at best. The EU has slammed ACTA.
Common sense in politics? ;)
Wasn't the end of the world said to be in 2012?
A candidate who wins election by 50.1% percent isn't popular even though he won.
You are limiting your own imagination if you only assume two candidates when talking about an election. I hope that is not the case, that you just worded yourself so that it possible to interpret it that way.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
You complain about taxation? Try Europe, it's no fun here either.
You are not kidding, Märchensteuer (Sales Tax) is 19.0% in Germany and almost 50% of my income is gone after I pay tax and health insurance. Our problem is pretty much same as in any other western country. Corrupt politicians are lining their own pockets while telling everyone else to save and pay more taxes.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Switch to Yahoo Search. The search results are just as good, it has that little more tab (the blue tab under the search box after you query) that gives you plenty of easy jump off points, and no irritating "instant search" baloney.
As for TFA, considering from what had been leaked it was so one sided pro USA media cartels it wasn't even funny, I'm surprised it took this long. They'd have to be seriously bought and paid for to screw themselves so badly on a trade deal.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Many great classic rock bands seem to be composed of 4 or 5 Englishmen. :P There's that, at least. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Who would have ever thought that European nations would ever be more concerned about liberty and due process than The united States of America?
Because those concepts are both European in origin?
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
They can't formally reject until there is a final proposal...
laquadrature is not the EU Parliament. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/public/focus_page/008-80686-195-07-29-901-20100714FCS78876-14-07-2010-2010/default_p001c001_en.htm mentions there will be talk on Wednesday but nothing more.
In the UK, you can probably count on one hand the number of politicians who won an election with more than 50% of the vote. My MP got 34.7%, while the next-closest candidate got 33.2%. 50.1% means that you are more popular than all of the other candidates combined - it's a very healthy majority.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, the sobriquet "lads from Liverpool" doesn't help if you don't know where Liverpool is. :)
anyway, I sometimes tend to respond in kind to sarcasm and the like.
I am not making the England/UK mistake BTW; none of these musicians happen to be from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. :P
The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Judas Priest for more examples. Freddie Mercury was born outside England but lived in England, probably Queen too. :)
I've been meaning to gather statistics on the national origin of my music collection
Foreign films? Being extremely impressed with Kurosawa's ouevre comes to mind; I specifically saw Rashomon, 7 Samurai and Hidden Fortress, but I haven't gotten around to watching many movies since then of whatever nationality.
You're right, there are definitional issues, my Freddie Mercury example being one.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm glad to see that someone else has a similar itch as me with regard to this phrase. While it is explained in a reply to you that it might be appropriate in this case, it's up there with "an historic" as one of the things news reporters seem to say without thinking about it.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Look at a map and read an history book...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Political campaign spending is severely limited in most EU countries (in the UK political parties can't advertise in the media, which means parties are not in need of corruptive donations from corporations).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In a region where the majority of citizens are not particularly friendly towards the idea of mostly unregulated markets, any significant push for free-market necessarily has to come from above and be enforced to remain, so the description makes sense.
They must pay a bunch of people to post here, judging from the volume.
Added to the S/N ratio a few years ago; one troll tribe among many, I'm afraid.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani