More ACTA – Nationalist MEPs’ statement
Press release: PL MEPs undermine jobs in Malta
PN MEPs Simon Busuttil and David Casa said that the position of Labour MEPs on ACTA constitutes a serious threat to Maltese jobs in the manufacturing and in the IT sectors and called on them to reflect carefully before jumping to conclusions.
Without studying the full implications of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Labour Party declared itself against this agreement earlier today and accused the PN MEPs of supporting it.
“It took the Labour Party the grand total of one day to study and come up with a position on an agreement that has been negotiated since 2008. Unlike them, we will first study the agreement carefully and then make up our minds.” Busuttil and Casa said.
“However, we definitely agree that international cooperation against counterfeiting and piracy should be stepped up because this will protect jobs in Malta.” they said.
With regards to fears that ACTA will restrict internet users, the PN MEPs said that the European Commission has given repeated, detailed and written assurances that individual internet users will not be restricted in any way and that what internet users can do today they can still do after ACTA.
Moreover, the Legal Services of the European Parliament has also concluded that ACTA does not breach fundamental freedoms, including privacy.
“When the final vote on ACT comes to the European Parliament, we will only support it if we are sure that it does not create undue restrictions for internet users.” they said.
“Once again, Labour shoots from the hip. This is why they always get it wrong.” they concluded.
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“…the European Commission has given repeated, detailed and written assurances that individual internet users will not be restricted in any way and that what internet users can do today they can still do after ACTA.”
That’s called missing the wood for the tree, Simon. I guess that the adverb ‘legally’ should have been included somewhere in that sentence. The real issue is whether individual internet users will still be able to download copyrighted material freely as they do now after ACTA. It’s whether fair use is being wiped out or not.
We don’t ‘download copyrighted material freely’. We ‘download copyrighted material illegally and in flagrant abuse of the law’
Fair use is not being wiped out. Fair use refers to material whose copyright you own or to whose owner you have paid money in order to enjoy that fair use.
It’s fair use of your own stuff, not somebody else’s!
Nope, fair use is where I can take any public media, owned or not, and change it in order to re-create or comment on the work.
It seems that these two gentlemen have already decided that they will support ACTA. Should they vote accordingly, they are not representing the wishes of quite a percentage of their voters. Constituents should email these two gentlemen, expressing their concern, and reminding them that they (like the Franco Debonos of this world) are ultimately answerable to their voters, and we do not wish that our representatives to support ACTA. Should these MEPs receive enough emails, they will have to sit up and take notice.
Should you wish to contact them, here are their emails:
Dr. Simon Busuttil:
[email protected]
Mr. David Casa
[email protected]
Here’s a Comment is Free article about ACTA explaining why it’s a bad thing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/03/act-acta-democracy-free-speech
Personally I’m very much against the parts of ACTA forbidding circumvention of DRM as well as the circulation of tools to do so (is putting a DVD I bought onto an iPad such a heinous crime? Why shouldn’t I be able to re-encode my MP3’s to AAC?). I’m not a fan of the suggestion that a copy is a lost sale (because, no I would not have bought my whole MP3 collection again in a different format, and no, I won’t buy more than one copy of a film).
“…the European Commission has given repeated, detailed and written assurances that individual internet users will not be restricted in any way and that what internet users can do today they can still do after ACTA.”
That statement is blatantly untrue. Will I be able to download deCSS (open source library to decrypt and play DVDs)? How about use software like rtmpd to access encrypted streams? What will the effects on Linux be if decss and similar libraries become illegal in Europe? (I certainly wouldn’t be able to watch DVDs on 2 of my computers). Why exactly should people not be able to reverse engineer protocols to build legitimate applications that don’t, in themselves infringe copyright? How does limiting competition in this way help anything (e.g. open source implementation of Flash plugin)? I’ve mentioned a few projects that would clearly infringe ACTA – there are many more (even larger, e.g. components of Android) that would be questionable.
What hope do we have if, when it comes to such a critical component of our society, our politicians don’t know their arse from their elbow?
Yeah… Most probably many other projects wich re-created certain codecs to play certain media will also be effected, like videoLAN , Mplayer, libdvdcss2 to name a few…. The open source world will suffer… and the open source users like me and the many others will suffer… But the ones who live only in the closed source world like that of Microsoft Windows and/or Apple’s Macintosh don’t know how good people with good intentions will suffer with the bad ones!!