ACTA axed by EU parliament

Wednesday's vote on ACTA was rejected by parliamentarians 478 to 39, with 165 abstentions.

ACTA had previously been agreed to by 22 of the EU's 27 member nations. The United States and Japan were among other countries on board.

The international copyright agreement would have standardized laws protecting creators of products that are often the subjects of piracy and intellectual property disputes such as music, movies and fashion.

Oxfam, an NGO focused on development, suggested that ACTA’s intellectual property protections risked denying people in poorer countries access to cheaper medicines. "ACTA could have made life-saving drugs much costlier for the world's poorest, resulting in devastating consequences for their health,” Oxfam spokeswoman Leila Bodeux said. “With Europe's rejection, we're now hugely relieved that ACTA is going nowhere."

Critics also said the agreement would have violated Internet freedoms.

ACTA's defeat in the European Parliament was expected, and came despite efforts by some lawmakers to have the vote postponed pending the European Court of Justice's decision on whether the agreement posed a risk to civil liberties.

Karel De Gucht, European Commissioner for Trade, said before voting commenced that "a vote against ACTA will be a setback against our defense of intellectual property rights across the world."

Ahead of the vote, some parliamentarians expressed their disappointment that the European Commission had even signed on to ACTA in the first place.

Before the vote, Jan-Philipp Albrecht, a Green MP from Germany, said he hoped the session would send the commission a strong message after it "hesitated, ignored, and failed to inform (the parliament) properly."

He said a rejection of ACTA would allow "a more open debate on how intellectual property rights are asserted in Europe, whether in the analogue or the digital world."

mz, mkg/msh (AFP, dpa)