For the past few months, the European Commission and industry lobbyists have tried to pressure the European Parliament into abdicating responsibility for ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Instead, the Parliament has given the proposal an inordinate amount of attention, with five different committees devoting huge amounts of time and resources to the proposal. Five different committees looked at the proposal from a development, industry, civil liberties, legal and international trade perspective.

One by one, each of the Committees analysed ACTA, with an ever-dwindling degree of support for the proposal.

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Deutsch: Deutscher Artikel nach DMCA-Löschantrag entfernt

European procedures for the removal of online content that is judged or accused of being illegal currently depend on the interpretation of the e-Commerce Directive by Member States and private companies. This means that whenever sites, blog posts, images or comments on the internet are accused of being illegal, procedures implementing this Directive are not clear, not harmonised and lead to legal uncertainty.

Swedish text below

Dear Mr Fjellner,

I am writing to you with regard to your recent blog post on ACTA.

First of all thank you for providing a clarification after you tabled an amendment for the International Trade Committee vote next week calling for ACTA to be ratified. We are heartened to read that you believe that it would be irresponsible to take a definitive position on ACTA in the absence of assurances from the Commission. You further explain that clarifications are needed on “one or two” paragraphs.

For decades, committed pro-European politicians and academics have wished for a number of ingredients that would be necessary for the credibility of the European institutional framework. They wanted an effective, representative and democratic European Parliament. They wanted a European Parliament that was not just theoretically an equal player in the institutional framework in Brussels, but a Parliament that was a genuine counterweight to the Council (the Member States) and the European Commission. Finally, and most difficult to create, pro-European thinkers dreamed of the possibility of pan-European political campaigns driven by pan-European political movements.

After all of the announcements of ACTA's death, one would wonder why anybody would have felt the need to turn up to the anti-ACTA demonstrations today. In April, the European Parliamentarian in charge of the ACTA dossier said that ACTA was dead.[1] In May, the European Commissioner for the Information Society, Neelie Kroes, said that ACTA was dead.[2] Now, in June, four different European Parliament Committees rejected ACTA.[3] Was tumbleweed going to be the only participant at the ACTA demonstrations?

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Deutsch: Frankreich: YouTube haftet nicht für Inhalte

On 29 May 2012, in a case brought to court by TF1 against Google for its YouTube service, the High Court of Paris ruled that YouTube was just a hosting service and therefore not bound to police the content posted on it by its users.

TF1 sued Google in 2008 over a series of extracts from its programs posted on YouTube by its users.

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Introduction

Following the initial discussions in the European Parliament and the overwhelmingly negative workshop that was held on 1 March, ACTA is close to dead in Europe. What are the strategies for bringing it back to life and how will this impact on other similar initiatives? How can activists ensure that our great success so far can be maintained?

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Deutsch: Häufig gestellte Fragen zur Vorlage des ACTA-Abkommens beim Europäis...

Following the recent decision of the European Commission to refer the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the European Court of Justice, Access and EDRi have prepared this short FAQ to explain this process.