ACTA under fire from EP president
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is unbalanced and does not offer enough protection for the rights of internet users, the president of the European Parliament has said.
Martin Schulz, a German politician who became president of the parliament in January, said on Sunday that ACTA was a flawed agreement. His words came after massive protests on Saturday, in which tens of thousands of Europeans took to the streets to demonstrate against ACTA.
"The necessary balance of... protection of copyright on the one hand, and [protection of] users' fundamental rights on the other, is not sufficiently established in this agreement. So, I think it's not good in its current form," Schulz told Germany's ARD evening news on Sunday night.
The contents of ACTA, which has been under development since 2007, cannot be changed at this point, having been finalised in November 2010. If it is to come into force anywhere in the EU, it must be ratified wholesale by the European Parliament, as well as every EU member state.
Although the EU and 22 member states have signed ACTA, no-one has yet ratified it. Indeed, Poland, the Czech Republic and Latvia have all suspended their ratification processes pending further consultation.
Germany and Slovakia, neither of which has even signed ACTA, let alone ratified it, have also said they will not yet sign the agreement. In Germany's case, the country will hold off signing until the European Parliament has voted on EU-level ratification later this year.
ACTA is an international agreement, drawn up behind closed doors, that aims to bring much of the world up to the standards of copyright enforcement found in places such as the US and EU. Its critics say it ignores the rights of internet users and could harm free speech in countries that do not have the safeguards found in the EU and US.
According to the current timetable, the European Parliament's trade committee, INTA, will start examining ACTA on 29 February. INTA will make a recommendation to the parliament at the end of May, and the parliament will vote in mid-June.
Several groupings in the European Parliament have already expressed their hostility to ACTA. These include the Greens-European Free Alliance and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats, of which Schulz was chairman before assuming the parliamentary president's seat.
The ACTA protests in Europe on Saturday differed in size, depending on the country in which they were being held. In London, around 200 people demonstrated in front of the offices of rights-holder groups, while in Munich 16,000 took to the streets.
Protests were also seen in dozens more cities, including Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, Vilnius, Paris and Brussels.