Reeling ACTA treaty rejected by three European Parliament committees (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)
Momentum against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement continued to build on Thursday as three different committees of the European Parliament voted not to recommend adoption of the treaty. A final vote by the full European Parliament is scheduled for July.
The EU-wide votes followed on the heels of a Wednesday vote in the Dutch parliament. The Dutch government had placed the controversial copyright treaty on the back burner while it waited for the results of Europe-wide debate over the treaty. But the vote in the Dutch parliament will place pressure on the government to actively oppose the treaty.
The ACTA treaty is nominally an anti-counterfeiting treaty, but its provisions would have broader implications for copyright policy. While the treaty is not as bad as its strongest critics claim, it would be a vehicle for ratcheting up already excessive copyright protections by one more notch.
It was signed by President Obama last year, and was expected to be approved easily in Europe. But every EU nation must sign on for it to take effect, and the treaty has been losing momentum for months. The Netherlands joins Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany in expressing reservations.
On Thursday, three committees of the European Parliamentâ€"the industry committee, the civil liberties committee, and the legal affairs committeeâ€"all registered their disapproval of the treaty. But their decisions are not final. The trade committee must still weigh in, and then the matter will be taken up by the full European parliament later this summer.
In a blog post, Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge said the fight was not yet over. “What happened today was the first step in a long chain that ends with the final vote in all of the European Parliament, which is the vote where ACTA ultimately lives or dies,” he wrote. “If it is defeated on the floor of the European Parliament, then it’s a permakill. Boom, headshot.“
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