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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 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.
I noticed that too, but I'm guessing that it refers to the amount of MEPs who got somehow involved. That would be 369 out of 736 MEPs, a significant number. Since this is EU stuff, there's always the possibility that anything you read has been hastily translated from another language, adding additional noise.
I hope someone who isn't ignorant like me can clarify the signature thing though.
Really? They couldn't be bothered to count more than 369 signatures?
There are 736 Members of the European Parliament. 369 is a majority.
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?
"copycounterfeiting"? They even go after people who make copies of copies? That's just... wow... ;)
quick! to the Liberation-mobile!
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
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.
In the end, representation generally does happen, in a way - it's just that what individual members of a given society claim they want and value, and what the society actually promotes in the system of governance, are not necessarily the same thing.
Personal anecdote time: during uni I had one roommate from a place which will remain unnamed, but is generally one of impoverished & corrupt ones - at the time we were also watching on the BBC a major unrest there, revolving around electoral fraud. Of course he was openly disgusted at such state of affairs, rampant corruption, etc.
But what was he doing? Studying & living blissfully in a relatively expensive place, financed by his family at home in the position of public authority, on a curse leading to a diploma which will be useless (just for a paper; while cheating) - but with a position in a public institution at home virtually assured after his return.
The close relation between those things and what he supposedly despises never quite seemed to click with him... at most, some other groups / etc. were the guilty ones.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
A democratic institution representing the desires and best interests of it's electorate?
What gives?
Too many people to effectively bribe.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
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.
That analysis isn't quite right as Stephen Harper(current PM) has done a fair bit of boat rocking with his far right agenda etc. That asshole has undone some 30+ years of relative progress in just a few short years.
He is very willing to bend over for any US agreements however. Mostly because he's busy pointing at the US(the southern US in particular) as an example for Canada to follow, as though thats a good idea. He slacked up on that part however after their economy collapsed and ours mostly just dipped and leveled out rather than collapsing.
I was about to say "don't forget office sex with your pantsuited, bespectacled busty redhead secretary", but you already used your three wishes. :(
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The target was 369, a majority. The current total is 377.
There are 736 Members of the European Parliament. 369 is a majority.
It won't be when Microsoft gets done with it.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
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.
The European Parliament is usually a reliable entity with good sense. That's why there are so many rulings that allow the hateful non-elected European Commission to go over their heads in many issues. I wouldn't be surprised if the EC just ignores the Parliament and signs an agreement with the US to apply ACTA here.
After all, it's presided by a jerk called Barroso, that went from Maoist troublemaker in the 70s to free-market right-wing super-bureaucrat. He avidly supported the invasion of Iraq when he was the Portuguese Prime Minister and licked Bush's ass until his mouth turned brown. Strangely he was rewarded a job as head of the Commision in spite of being a spineless ass-licker that embarrassed and ashamed us Europeans, and specially us Portuguese.
Another ass-licker, Tony Blair, nearly won the job of President of European Council, but this time the outrage was too much for the Euro Dickhead Bureaucrats to sweep under the rug.
Is it Christina Hendricks? 'cos I would totally take back the other wishes. All of them.
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.
But what was he doing? Studying & living blissfully in a relatively expensive place, financed by his family at home in the position of public authority, on a curse leading to a diploma which will be useless (just for a paper; while cheating) - but with a position in a public institution at home virtually assured after his return.
Minus the cheating bit, your description could really apply to any somewhat privileged middle-class Western individual. In that sense it probably covers you, me, and the vast majority of Slashdot posters as well.
It sounds like your issue with this gentleman is the fact that he's enjoying his status on the backs of his own less-fortunate countrymen, while blaming their problems on someone else. But don't kid yourself that you're somehow morally superior to the guy. Those of us who are lucky to be born into a wealthy country are basically doing the same thing, we're just doing it on the backs of some other country's less-fortunate folks (and many of our own countrymen too).
If by 34% you mean 65%.
Also even if voter turnout was 34%, I would call 34% a democratic mandate. Nothing stopped the hypothetical 66% from not voting, and their abstinence is impartiality.
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
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.