European Parliament Committees Reject ACTA As IP Backlash Grows

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today [Thursday, May 31st], three European Parliament committees studying the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI), the Committee for Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and the Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) — all voted against implementing ACTA. Michael Geist reports on how the strength of the anti-ACTA movement within the European Parliament is part of a broader backlash against secretive intellectual property agreements that are either incorporated into broad trade agreements or raise critical questions about prioritizing IP enforcement over fundamental rights including votes and reports opposing these deals in the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Mexico."

Comments

The end is nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

What?! A legislative body actually voted AGAINST corporate interests? I guess the end of the world IS coming this year...

Re:The end is nigh

[MickyTheIdiot]

Going back to my last post, the depressing thing about the SOPA story is just how big the protest had to get before anyone in the media would pay any attention. Then the protest was demonized (often in a "pro-piracy" light). Then the protest had to even get BIGGER before it was treated fairly at all. The protest even had to get BIGGER THAN THAT before our idiot congresspeople paid any attention.

This is what I am talking about... it shows how much the corporate state gets listened to (and automatically treated as having the "correct" opinion) as opposed to your every day person that is supposed to have a voice. In that way the SOPA fight was very disturbing... you have to have a petition with millions of signatures before your own representative will even take your call.

IP is the new "gold"

[TheDarkMaster]

From some time now some guys decided that intellectual property is the new wealth. You do not accumulate anymore material goods such as gold, wood, grains: You now accumulate patents and extorts anyone who try to do something material using - even partially - some of these patents.

And patents is something perfect from the standpoint of the investor: The cost to generate one can almost get to zero but the profits can reach low Earth orbit (using the calculations of the RIAA)


(P.S: Damn you, Google translator. Brazilian->English translation sucks)

Re:Proud

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the USA, one can only hope it will take forever.

Good for them

[jakimfett]

prioritizing IP enforcement over fundamental rights

This is the part that gets me. I'm all for punishing thieves. I'm not for slaughtering someone in the courts, cutting off their internet, and vilifying them in the media because they downloaded a couple songs and the episode of Game of Thrones that they missed.

To me, Big Media isn't sending the message of "we're being hurt by copyright infringement", the're saying "hey, we have enough money to buy off significant portions of governments, it'd be a shame to put it to use in a productive manner (like by streamlining and expanding digital distribution to give people what they want...)"

Re:Proud

[AliasMarlowe]

The entire house of cards is on the verge of collapse, but at least our bureaucrats found the time to vote this shit down.

Actually, it's the elected representatives (in the European Parliament) who are voting it down, and who have repeatedly expressed their opposition to the secretiveness of the negotiation process and to what has resulted from those negotiations. The unelected bureaucrats (European Commission and its ilk) were largely in favor, and actively participated in those secret negotiations.

Many things would have worked out differently (drastically different in a few cases) if the EU were run more democratically. And reducing the democratic deficit is probably an essential step (not the only one, of course) towards exiting the present fiasco.

Exactly six years since the Pirate Bay raid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Today is the sixth anniversary of the Swedish police's raid on The Pirate Bay, as evidenced by the "This Day on Slashdot" on the front page. That was not the reasons for the founding of the Swedish Pirate Party, which had happened 5 months earlier, but it was the first time they got any media attention and their membership grew by hundreds of percents on a single day. Three years later, in spring 2009, the case was being negotiated in the district court and the attention from that is probably what let the party enter the European parliament.

Now, another three years have passed and two Pirate Party MEPs have spent years inside the parliament. Today one of them had her draft opinion, which was extremely critical of ACTA and recommended the parliament to reject the treaty, accepted as the opinion of the ITRE committe. The other Pirate Party MEP was one of the votes against a pro-ACTA draft opinion in a very close vote in the JURI committee. The draft opinion was rejected, with the result that ITRE also recommends the parliament to reject ACTA.

Is this what they call "the long tail"?