ACTA rejected by European Union vote

 

ACTA has been rejected by the European Parliament, which voted on Wednesday to put the final nail in the copyright enforcement treaty's coffin — at least as far as Europe is concerned.
The Parliament voted by 478 to 39 to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a move that means it cannot come into force anywhere within the EU. In doing so, it followed the advice given to it by five parliamentary comitteees and heeded the massive public protests that were sparked by the treaty earlier this year.

The EU and most of its member states did sign ACTA in January. However, with such agreements, signatures have to be followed by parliamentary ratification if they are to mean anything. In the EU, both the European Parliament and every single member state had to ratify for it to come into force. Not a single member state has ratified ACTA, and the Parliament has now joined Poland and other states in flatly rejecting such ratification.
Whether or not ACTA survives at all now likely depends on whether or not the US ratifies it — there is some debate as to whether Congress or President Obama gets to do this. Obama has previously endorsed the treaty, but now finds himself in an election year where the memory of the SOPA/PIPA defeat is still fresh in many activists' minds...