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If you watched the stream of the plenary session in the European
Parliament yesterday, you will know that what we saw was an incredible
parade of politicians from all parties denouncing ACTA - with one exception. The centre-right EPP Group is asking for a decision on ACTA to
be postponed until after the European Court of Justice hands down its
judgement on the compatibility of the treaty with EU law. That's likely
to take a year or two, and amounts to a massive delaying tactic, as
I've explained before.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Well, never a dull moment in the world of ACTA.
After I wrote yesterday's column summing up what I thought was the
final state of play, things got very interesting in Strasbourg. Rumours
swirled that the right-of-centre EPP Group would be trying to use the agenda meeting last night to call for ACTA to be postponed. After a flurry of excitement, nothing happened then. But a little later, this tweet was posted on the EPP Group account:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Techdirt has reported over the last few months, the passage of
ACTA through the European Union's approval process has been little short
of extraordinary. At the end of last year, ACTA seemed almost certain
to be approved without difficulty. Then, inspired by the Internet
community's success in stopping SOPA, European citizens woke up to
ACTA's problems and took to the streets in huge numbers.
On
Techdirt.
So, here we are: the final decisive week that is likely to determine the fate not just of ACTA, but
also the course of digital copyright law in the world for the next few
years (for the full background to how we got here, and what has happened
along the way, see previous ACTA Updates.) That's because ACTA is not a law as such, but a treaty that sets the context for future laws of its signatories. It's why ACTA is so dangerous: it effectively neuters the sovereign power of nations - and hence of their citizens.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Techdirt has been covering the important Myriad Genetics case for a while. Although the CAFC decided
that isolated genes could be patented, the Supreme Court has asked the
appeals court to review the case in light of the former's rejection of medical diagnostic patents.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt reported
in 2010, the passage of the Digital Economy Act was one of the most
disgraceful travesties of the UK parliamentary process in recent times;
it was badly drafted, hardly revised and then pushed through with almost
no debate in the dying moments of the previous government. Since then,
two UK ISPs -- BT and TalkTalk -- have challenged the Act in the
courts, but lost earlier this year.
On
Techdirt.
We take antibiotics and their ability to kill practically all
bacteria for granted. But scientists are increasingly warning that we
may be about to leave what might come to be seen as a golden age for
anti-bacterial drugs, and enter a post-antibiotic era. As the World
Health Organization’s Director-General said, quoted in an article on the Citizen Vox site:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has always been sceptical about Nathan Myhrvold's business
plan for Intellectual Ventures (IV) -- build up a huge portfolio of
patents, simply so that it can then license them to those that will, and
sue those that won't. Others, however, have been dazzled by Myhrvold's
pedigree as an extremely wealthy ex-Microsoft manager, and by the fact
that patents have undeniably become a central concern for the tech
industries in recent years, which suggests that there is plenty of money
to be made from them.
On
Techdirt.
One of the earliest proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:
On
Techdirt.
As I wrote yesterday, one of the most pressing problems the open
source community faces in the near future is the Unitary Patent
proposal, which is likely to bring in software patents to Europe.
Here's the background, and what we can do about it.
On
Techdirt.
Mike recently reminded us that for some people, bizarrely, stopping "piracy" is more important than making money. Here's another example, this time from Norway:
On
Techdirt.
Marielle Gallo is probably best known for the Gallo Report, which Techdirt described
back in 2010 as a "similarly draconian intellectual property
enforcement" to ACTA, with which it has much in common. So it's no
surprise that Gallo has been one of the few vocal supporters of ACTA,
and it was widely expected that the EU's Legal Affairs (JURI) committee
she chairs would support her draft opinion calling for ACTA to be
ratified. As we now know, that didn't happen, and JURI formed one of five committees that all recommended that ACTA should be rejected.
On
Techdirt.
One of the the reasons why legislation like SOPA and treaties like
ACTA are so dangerous is that their loose definitions allow measures
intended to deal with copyright infringement to be used to censor
inconvenient opinions. Unfortunately, that's not just a theoretical
problem with future legislation, but one that is already happening, as this post from Rick Falkvinge makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next
few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking
place, all connected with openness in some way. Quite why everything is
happening at once is not entirely clear - unless politicians are trying
to get everything out of the way before their summer hols, perhaps....
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The day before the EU's International Trade committee (INTA) recommended
that the European Parliament should reject ACTA, the EU commissioner
with responsibility for the treaty, Karel De Gucht, had given a speech
to its members, trying to win them over. Although it was short, it
turns out to be highly revealing about the European Commission's future ACTA strategy. Here's what he said:
On
Techdirt.
There's a fairly constant pattern in the world of copyright
enforcement. The media companies claim that piracy is "destroying"
their industries, although they never offer any independent evidence to
back this up. They "demand" that governments "do something" -- by which
they mean introduce harsher penalties for unauthorized downloads.
Because of the hypnotic effect that musicians and artists seem to have
on politicians, governments happily oblige, even though there is no
evidence that such laws will help artists. After the laws come in to
force, online sharing may dip for a while, but soon returns to previous
levels, so the media companies start whining again, and demand yet
tougher penalties.
On
Techdirt.
Last year I wrote about the OpenCorporates project, which describes itself as follows:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Once more, there's good news on the ACTA front. Today, the important European Parliament committee responsible for handling international trade issues, INTA, voted to recommend that the European Parliament reject ACTA when it comes to a plenary vote on 4 July.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Another major milestone has been achieved in the push to get ACTA
rejected by the EU: a fifth parliamentary committee has recommended that
the European Parliament should refuse to ratify it when it is put to
the vote on July 4th, effectively killing it in Europe. The other committees
– on legal affairs, civil liberties, industry and international
development – recommended rejection a few weeks ago, but today's vote by
the international trade committee (INTA) was seen as the most
important.
On
Techdirt.
The computing revolution is not the only one driven by constant
scaling of technologies: the field of genomics -- the study of DNA
sequences -- has also enjoyed rapid falls in basic costs over the last
decade and a half. This means that whereas the first human genome cost
around $3 billion to sequence, we are fast approaching the point where
it will cost first a few thousand, and then a few hundred dollars to
sequence anyone's complete DNA. An interesting post on the Health
Affairs Blog points out that neither the law nor society is ready for this.
On
Techdirt.
On the not-very-scientific basis of several calls to MEPs yesterday, the impression I get is that the right-of-centre ECR group on the INTA committee will be pushing for delay until after the ECR has delivered its judgement. That could be in more than a year's time, and would be a big problem in terms of getting ACTA rejected, since all of the momentum that has built up over the last six months would be lost.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Until recently there has been an unchallenged assumption that the
more copyright, the better. Although people have begun to realize
that's not the case – and that extending copyright diminishes the public
domain because we must all wait longer for works to enter it --
governments around the world continue to make copyright longer, stronger
and broader.
On
Techdirt.
A few months ago we wrote
about a really bad idea that was being floated in Germany: making
companies like Google pay for the use of news snippets in services such
as Google News. Unfortunately, that idea has now been turned into a
concrete proposal for a new law; remarkably, it is even worse than the
original plans.
On
Techdirt.
When the history of modern Brazil comes to be written, a special
place will be reserved for the soybean, the powerful farmers that grow
it -- and the deforestation
it is driving. And at the center of that tale will be Monsanto, with
its patented "Roundup Ready" crop, so called because it has been
genetically modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as
Roundup.
On
Techdirt.
So, we arrive at the penultimate stage of the battle to stop ACTA in
Europe. Before the final plenary vote in the European Parliament in
July, there is a vote in the International Trade committee (INTA) this Thursday. As its home page explains:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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