

Epic win for transparency on ACTA - stse
http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/epic-win-for-transparency-on-acta/

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erikstarck
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". :)

~~~
stse
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>

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jhancock
"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.

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

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narag
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 :-(

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Groxx
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.

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mseebach
... for _very_ small values of epic.

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

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

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

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

[http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/actaavtalet-eu-
parlamentet-...](http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/actaavtalet-eu-parlamentet-
ryter-till-1.1058997)

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tsuraan
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.

~~~
ErrantX
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._

