Good news:  Global censorship treaty ‘dead in the water’

We read:

"The European Parliament will effectively kill off the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty’s rapporteur tells The Telegraph.

David Martin MEP said that the controversial treaty was likely to be rejected by the Parliament in July, and that new measures to deter music, film and software piracy were likely to take two years before they came into force.

Mr Martin stepped in to become the Treaty’s rapporteur in the European parliament after the resignation of Kader Arif, who condemned the process of secret talks.

Mr Martin said that the treaty would not effectively tackle online piracy and that he would be recommending Parliament reject it.

“The case for stronger intellectual property defence is very clear,” said Mr Martin. “But the atmosphere was wrong, with negotiations done behind closed doors without any real information coming out afterwards. What’s emerged is a thin text with insufficient detail, which appears to put duties on internet service providers to act as internet policemen.” It made no attempt to define, he said, for instance between “commercial” and “personal” downloading.

 He added that the existing system of “notice and takedown” for content on the web should be better and more consistently applied across Europe

Source

SOPA was defeated in the USA.  Now its European counterpart is dead too.