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Deutsch: ENDitorial: ACTA, die Resolution des Europäischen Parlaments und poli...
The European Parliament adopted a widely-reported Resolution on ACTA on 10 March. It contained several positive elements. For example, it insists that the Agreement not go beyond the requirements of existing EU law and demands an impact assessment of ACTA's implementation on fundamental rights and data protection. This latter provision is particularly important with regard to countries outside the EU, which do not always have legal protections for fundamental rights.
In addition, however, and widely unnoticed, a last-minute oral amendment from the conservative EPP group was also adopted. This amendment calls for "the Commission to continue the negotiations on ACTA and limit them to the existing European IPR enforcement system against counterfeiting". That text was adopted by a huge majority. So, if the European Commission persists in pushing non-counterfeiting issues such as ISP liability in ACTA, it will only have itself to blame if and when the Parliament is pushed into rejecting the agreement by the Commission's actions.
This clarity from the Parliament is a remarkable contribution to clarity and openness in this dossier, following weeks and months of half-truths and misleading statements, particularly with regard to "three-strikes" measures. We have recently heard several positive statements from politicians about "three strikes" and ACTA. The assistant US Trade Representative Stanford McCoy said "the U.S. Government is not seeking these or any other obligations that would go beyond U.S. law in the ACTA", the European Commissioner Karel de Gucht's spokesman said the EU is "not supporting and will not accept that an eventual ACTA agreement creates an obligation to disconnect people" and the German minister said "the Federal Government will accept no agreement that contains blocking of Internet access".
The only problem is that it was never anybody's intention to place an obligation on ISPs via ACTA to introduce a "three-strikes" rule or similar. As the recent leak of the draft digital chapter clearly and definitively proved, the plan was to remove ISPs' limitations of liability for IPR infringements unless they chose to implement "measures" to prevent these infringements from happening. The intention was, therefore, to coerce ISPs into far-reaching policing activities in order to give themselves adequate legal certainty. The point is therefore not to use ACTA to mandate the precise nature of these activities - so the assurances on this point were devoid of all real meaning.
It is interesting to note that, despite the German Minister's and European Commission's protestations that they would not accept the cutting of Internet access being in ACTA, the leak indicating the different negotiating partners' positions shows no hint of any EU opposition to the measures explicitly aimed at coercing ISPs into cutting subscribers' connections.
Now there is no room for doubt. The European Parliament has said that "the proposed agreement should not make it possible for any so-called 'three-strikes' procedures to be imposed" and, in any event "any agreement must include the stipulation that the closing-off of an individual's Internet access shall be subject to prior examination by a court.
While the Parliament's resolution is not legally binding, it would be foolhardy for the Commission to believe that a majority of 633 to 13 (with 16 abstentions) from the only directly elected EU institution can be safely ignored.
Leaked digital chapter (17.02.2010)
http://sites.google.com/site/actadigitalchapter/acta_digital_chapter.p...
Negotiating positions (12.02.2010)
http://blog.die-linke.de/digitalelinke/wp-content/uploads/ACTA-6437-10...
USTR: No mandatory 'three strikes' or filtering in ACTA (10.02.2010)
http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2010/02/ustr-no-mandatory-t...
German minister's position (only in German, 3.03.2010)
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,681142,00.html
EDRi-gram: Leaked ACTA text confirms suspicions (24.02.2010)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number8.4/leaked-acta-confirms-suspicions
(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)