Reuters reports, “Tens of thousands of protesters took part in rallies (in more than 200 cities) across Europe on Saturday against ACTA, an international anti-piracy agreement they fear will curb their freedom to download movies and music for free and encourage Internet surveillance. …More than 25,000 demonstrators braved freezing temperatures in German cities to march against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)…” The article notes 16,000 protested in Munich, 4,000 in Sofia, 2,000 in Berlin, 1,500 in Prague, 1,000 in Paris, 500 in Warsaw, and thousands more in Brussels, Bucharest, Vilnius, Dublin and other European cities.
“Governments of eight nations including Japan and the United States (and Canada) signed an agreement in October aiming to cut copyright and trademark theft. The signing was hailed as a step toward bringing ACTA into effect.”
“Some European countries have signed ACTA but it has not yet been signed or ratified in many countries. Germany’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday it would hold off on signing. …The Czech government has held off on ratification of the ACTA treaty, saying it needs to be analyzed.”
The European parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA, MEP Kader Arif, resigned from his position on January 26 denouncing ACTA “in the strongest possible manner” for having “no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, (and) exclusion of the European Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in the assembly.”
In February 2011, Council of Canadians trade campaigner Stuart Trew blogged on University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist’s presentation to a House of Commons international trade committee hearing on the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Trew writes, “Canada was part of ACTA talks, in which the U.S. and EU were protagonists. Mr. Geist said that while few would oppose efforts to stop dangerous counterfeit products, ACTA was far too secret for an intellectual property discussion that should have happened at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He added that ACTA went far beyond commercial issues and strayed beyond international norms of intellectural property rights provisions. …Many of those proposals rejected in ACTA are reproduced in CETA, said Mr. Geist, including the secrecy. …The EU is simply trying to export a copyright regime to Canada that it could not secure in ACTA, he said.”
