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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.
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
quick! to the Liberation-mobile!
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Repeating the standard pub arguments about politics is not the same as "insightful", mods.
The whole ACTA thing is already being negotiated behind closed doors. It's unlikely that anyone is trying to bribe MEPs at this point since the European Parliament is not directly involved in the negotiations itself, and the European Commission is trying its best to keep them as far as possible from the negotiations. Not to mention that it's pretty hard to bribe that many individual MEPs with so many different political backgrounds and nationalities so as to block a written declaration from passing. It would be one of the most expensive and idiotic strategies ever.
And of course MEPs do this because it advances their agenda: they don't want to be kept out by the European Commission from negotiations like this only to be presented with a fait accompli later on. Well, that combined with the fact that several of them also don't like the inclusion of patents in it, and all the stuff about cutting people's Internet access for copyright infringements is also not very popular there.
Note that I'm not saying that it *is* over now. However, that is unrelated to any alleged bribery or selfishness.
Donate free food here
Nope. The EC has exactly two tries.
1. The EC submits the draft.
2. If the EP accepts, it's passed. Otherwise...
3. The EP rejects the draft and gives the EC a list of things they want changed.
4. The EC submits a new version of the draft.
5. If the EP accepts, it's passed. Otherwise...
6. The EC can try to reconcile with the EP and figure out a shared draft. If this fails...
7. The draft is dead and can't be resubmitted.
I think the EC could try to start a war of attrition with the EP but that could end with the EP just veoting anything looking remotely like IP legislation until the EC shuts up.
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