ACTA Gets Death Certificate In Europe

First time accepted submitter Seeteufel writes "The controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is now officially pronounced dead in the E.U. The European Parliament broadly rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement a while ago, but there was still a court case pending at the European Court of Justice about the legality of ACTA. The Commission was open about its intent to reintroduce ACTA ratification to the Parliament after a positive Court decision. Now we learn the Commission has withdrawn its questions to the Court."

This may not be as good as you think!

[Anonymous Coward]

First thought: GREAT!
Second thought: It's better for them to not have a court ruling saying that some of the ACTA content violate some EU principles when they will try to re-introduce the same content in CETA.

meanwhile in Germany

[terec]

I'm glad ACTA didn't make it. But the copyright lobby in Europe remains extremely powerful. For example, in Germany, they have successfully pushed the government to try to implement a copyright on snippets [wikipedia.org]. This follows a long list of pretty hair-raising special rights [wikipedia.org] and fees [wikipedia.org] that different failing industries managed to carve out for themselves. I think the successful fight against ACTA in Europe has less to do with a respect for liberties and privacy and more with simple economic realities: ACTA would primarily have benefited US companies doing business in Europe; European companies are already well protected by draconian European laws.

EU vs Human Rights

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the end. EU Charter of Human rights is different from the European Convention on Human Rights. It has an extra phrase in it:

"Intellectual property shall be protected."

Article 17, Right to property.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf

This defined Patents Copyrights etc. mostly CORPORATE assets, as equivalent to human property and the right to hold these and have them protected as a fundamental HUMAN right. They contaminated the Human Rights Declaration with their lobbyist crap, wrapped it up in a similar name and declared THAT document as the definition of human rights in the EU.

So what the EU Commission was up to, was to ask the European Court (which is not the Hague Court that reviews human rights cases), if ACTA was compatible with Human Rights (as defined by this fake Human Rights Declaration that the EU came up with that includes that phrase). You see the game being played there?

If you think that an EU Commission that would try that, would simply drop it, you would be naive. My guess is, it will be substantially moved into anti-terror legislation. Perhaps the Clean IT mk 2:

http://www.edri.org/files/cleanIT_sept2012.pdf

Recall Clean IT, this document resulted from meetings between European Police, NGOs and ISPs and generated a secret draft which included agreed items to counter terrorist speech by surveillance and censorship and liability for ISPs for not enforcing it.

It was not a basis for EU Law, rather the police/NGOs/LEAs/ISP would agree to it, the ISPs would define the law in their terms of service agreements, and the national law would be changed by lobbying from them at a national level to fix any legal problems. It's been dismissed as a talking document, yet the key points were largely agreed by the national police forces and NGOs.

I repeat the key points WERE ALREADY LARGELY AGREED. ISPs would include those terms in their EULAs, which in turn would stop the police going after the ISPs and by contract rather than EU law, Clean IT was set to be implemented, the schedule was up for discussion, but the basics were already agreed. Who needs the EU Parliament, if the police and ISPs decide to implement it by contract law?

CleanIT is almost ACTA, a few tweaks here and there and you have ACTA. Just play with the definition of 'terrorist' a little differently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_terrorism