Some good news on the 4th of July

hey...! yay...!

EU Defeats ACTA

European Parliament votes against controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

ACTA, the controversial online piracy treaty, was dealt a blow on Wednesday when the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject it.

The European Parliament voted 478 to 39 against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was drawn up in secret and had been protested by hundreds of thousands across the EU who saw the treaty as an infringement on internet freedom.

President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz welcomed the decision and stated that "ACTA is the wrong solution to fight online piracy." He said that the treaty negotiations had lacked transparency and acknowledged the massive public mobilizations against the treaty.

"The majority of the parliament is of the opinion that ACTA is too vague - leaving room for abuses and raising concerns about its impact on privacy and civil liberties, on innovation, creativity and the free flow of information," wrote Schulz.

"We have to take all possible measures to fight piracy, but this should never be done at the cost of what has made the internet one of the most revolutionary technologies in history: the EP wants the web to remain free and open," he added.

now, let's make sure SOPA, PIPA and CISPA never see the light of day...

 

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Good news - SOPA vote delayed in House

let's hope the damned thing goes away and never comes back...

from the chicago tribune...

A key House vote on controversial anti-piracy legislation has been delayed.

The House Judiciary Committee adjourned on Friday without deciding on whether or not to send the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor.

The committee had been engaged in a marathon markup version of the bill, but the session came to an abrupt end, as Congress had to turn its attention to a floor vote on a nearly $1 trillion spending bill that would avert a government shutdown.

The discussion will resume when Congress is next in session -- which could be next week.

it's a bill for censorship, pure and simple, designed to serve the monied interests and has nothing at all to do with the common good, free speech or open internet access...

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What's worse, the Defense Authorization Act or the Stop Online Piracy Act?

as soon as i read the story about hillary's unbelievably hypocritical speech at the hague extolling OTHER countries to espouse unfettered internet freedom, i just KNEW glenn would be all over it like white on rice...

Hillary Clinton and Internet Freedom

Hypocrisy from the U.S. Government — having U.S. officials self-righteously impose standards on other countries which they routinely violate — is so common and continuous that the vast majority of examples do not even merit notice. But sometimes, it is so egregious and shameless — and sufficiently consequential — that it should not go unobserved. Such is the case with the speech delivered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday at a Conference on Internet Freedom held at the Hague, a conference devoted to making “a stand for freedom of expression on the internet, especially on behalf of cyber dissidents and bloggers.”

[...]

She astutely observed that “those who push these plans often do so in the name of security.” She added that “the first challenge is for the private sector to embrace its role in protecting internet freedom,” which — she lamented — has not always happened: “A few years ago, the headlines were about companies turning over sensitive information about political dissidents. Earlier this year, they were about a company shutting down the social networking accounts of activists in the midst of a political debate.” She concluded with a real flourish: “Our government will continue to work very hard to get around every barrier that repressive governments put up” even though such governments will try to maintain those barriers “by resorting to greater oppression.”

What Hillary Clinton is condemning here is exactly that which not only the administration in which she serves, but also she herself, has done in one of the most important Internet freedom cases of the last decade: WikiLeaks. And beyond that case, both Clinton specifically and the Obama administration generally have waged a multi-front war on Internet freedom.

[...]

Perhaps worst of all, many of the administration’s key allies in the Senate are now pushing a bill – in the name of stopping online piracy (SOPA) — that would vest the U.S. government and the largest corporations with draconian powers literally to shut down or otherwise disable Internet sites without due process. Hillary Clinton personally ”tacitly endorsed that bill,” enabling the bill’s key Democratic Congressional supporters to tout State Department support for it. As EFF’s Trevor Timm recently wrote: “Ironically, we know from the WikiLeaks cables that the State Department has also aggressively lobbied many other countries for strict new laws similar to SOPA. They have even offered to fund enforcement and literally draft the laws that sacrifice free speech for greater copyright protection for Hollywood.”

here's glenn talking with cenk uygur on current's young turks...

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