Epic win for transparency on ACTA | Hacker News Reader

Epic win for transparency on ACTA

christianengstrom.wordpress.com

76 pointsstse20 comments

Christian is an MEP in the European Parliament for the Pirate Party of Sweden. I sort of like politicians who use words like "epic win". :)

Especially when it's genuine. Christian was programming before I was born.

http://www.glindra.org/about.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Engstr%C3%B6m

"This is a resolution by a virtually unanimous parliament, but it is not formally binding for the Commission. If they want to ignore us, they technically can."

Can someone please help me understand "who" this ACTA commission is and under what government(s) authority it is operating? Its all very mysterious, reminds me of the WTO. Throughout the 90s, you'd heard news about WTO meets with zero explanation as to who there were and under what authority they operated.

I presume he means the European Commission:

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

Yes. The new trade commissioner, by the way, is in favour of more openness, and opposed to the three strikes rule.

E.g. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057434...

"We are not supporting and will not accept that an eventual Acta agreement creates an obligation to disconnect people from the internet because of illegal downloads"

There's three major bodies in EU: the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament.

The European Parliament is directly elected by the people, has 736 members, and each member is part of one of (currently) seven groups usually depending on which group is closest politically to their actual political party in the home country. The biggest groups are the conservatives, the social democrats, liberals, greens and christian democrats.

Then you have the council of ministers which consists of the executive branches of all member states, which makes it sort of elected by the people. The council has legislative power together with the parliament, but no EU-wide executive power, since their actual job is to govern their own countries. They are also responsible for implementing EU directives locally.

Finally you have the European Commission which is the EU-wide executive branch. Each country's executive branch appoints one commissioner each, which makes them twice removed from being elected (and of course criticized for it). They don't have legislative power, but they can suggest legislation for the parliament to vote on. It is this body that is participating in the ACTA negotiations on behalf of the EU member nations, so that each country's executive branch doesn't have to.

In other words: the parlament has not much power. We've seen this too many times. I've followed how other issues like the three strikes laws and software patents have been managed and it's disheartening. Even when the parlament voted massively against, the Commission and the lobbies seem to work this way around every time :-(

Yes! Someone standing up against opacity in this!

Now if we could only get the USA to do the same. Maybe they've gotten over their neutral stance on transparency, maybe not, but in a friggin' (ideally a) democracy opacity in something like this is unethical.

... for very small values of epic.

Epically small values of epic.

Am I the only one getting really tired of the adjective "epic"? Particularly in the case of "epic fail", which just seems so self-righteous.

I was half hoping it was a pun involving the Electronic Privacy Information Center: http://epic.org/

"Let us see the whole ACTA text or else... We will be very, very angry with you... And we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are..."

What does everyone think the timeframe will be for this to hit mainstream news? I feel like it must be soon.

Never -- the companies that own the mainstream news are the same ones participating in the secret negotiations.

Mainstream news meaning, "Anglo-Saxon mainstream news"? ;)

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/actaavtalet-eu-parlamentet-...

So that's going to be our victory then? We'll be getting a new copyright law with more term extensions, three strikes, ISP enforcement, and god only knows what else they manage to cook up, but at least we get to read it before congress passes it? That sure makes it better.

From the article:

But this is just the beginning. This is a resolution by a virtually unanimous parliament, but it is not formally binding for the Commission. If they want to ignore us, they technically can. Then we will have to fight on

And once we do get access to the documents, the fight over the content of the agreement will begin in earnest. This was a big win, but it was only a battle. Most of the war remains.

Yes, it does make it better. It gives people not holed up in the meetings a chance to expose things and get them changed.

It's far from a guarantee, but not having transparency in this does guarantee abusive decisions are easier to make.

I don't think it's looking that bad... Read this for example: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057434...

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