This whole month was a really bad month for the Ant-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This month, the agreement seems to be getting off to a rough start as well. News is surfacing that the agreement was rejected by three European committees.
The blows keep coming for the secretive agreement. Last month, things went from bad to worse. It started with ACTA getting sent to the European court of justice amid speculation that ACTA would never be accepted in Europe. After that, 50 law professors in the US questioned the agreements constitutionality. The blows continued as the Romanian Prime Minister said his country won’t accept ACTA. While the UK Pirate Party called for a London protest against the agreement, the agreement was rejected in the Netherlands. We thought this month would then be capped off with four documents getting leaked which appeared to be meeting notes of the negotiation between 2008 and 2010.
Now, Ars Technica is reporting that the agreement was rejected by three European committees. From the report:
On Thursday, three committees of the European Parliament—the industry committee, the civil liberties committee, and the legal affairs committee—all registered their disapproval of the treaty. But their decisions are not final. The trade committee must still weigh in, and then the matter will be taken up by the full European parliament later this summer.
In a blog post, Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge said the fight was not yet over. “What happened today was the first step in a long chain that ends with the final vote in all of the European Parliament, which is the vote where ACTA ultimately lives or dies,” he wrote. “If it is defeated on the floor of the European Parliament, then it’s a permakill. Boom, headshot.”
One things for sure, it’s really looking like the agreement is now on the ropes and now we’re looking to see if it can get up to stagger into and upset positive vote in Europe or if the European Union will deliver a final knockout vote that would fully kill off the embattled agreement.
(Hat Tip)
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Drew Wilson is perhaps one of the more well-known file-sharing and technology news writers around. A journalist in the field since 2005, his work has had semi-regular appearances on social news websites and even occasional appearances on major news outlets as well. Drew founded freezenet.ca and still contributes to ZeroPaid. Twitter | Google Plus
