Sadly, not true. Leutheuser-Schnarrenberger has explicitly spoken in favor of ACTA just a few days ago.

See this German link: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesregierung-sieht...

In favor of ratifying ACTA, I'd say. IANAL, but as far as I know, current German law qualifies for most of the ACTA agreements already, so just passing it wouldn't change things per se. The bigger issue here is ACTA as a signal.

So I can understand her somewhat. If ACTA would've been yet another EU regulation passed without much fuss and recognition, it would've been better to focus on actual laws, where Leutheuser-Schnarrenberger still has to fight basically the rest of the government over data retention (I really dread the next government's actions here).

It's probably better this way, though. Any show that the public actually cares matters a lot.

German laws don't already mostly cover ACTA. The politicians are saying the same thing across europe, but it's all lies and deception. One instance is criminal prosecution instead of civil, no rights for private copies anymore, forcing ISP's to cooperate with "rights-holders" bypassing the courts and forcing them to proactively monitor their networks (else they could be fined huge sums), etc, etc.

Actually the ISP umbrella organizations published statements that they think ACTA bypasses democratic processes, and puts them into the position of police and judge all in one, and much more...

Like I said, I am not a lawyer. I'd be grateful for any detailed analysis of ACTA as compared to current German law. There's an insane amount of hyperbole on either side…

One basic problem with something like ACTA is that mostly it's "encouraging" countries to think and debate about "appropriate" measures and laws. A lot of the language is about "might" "should endeavor to" etc. – and it probably has to, or you might just clash with national legal concepts. So just signing it might imply a response from "Will do sir! Let's get the jackboots out!" to "Yeah, yeah, sure, we'll all have a nice chat about it…".

Still, signing it is a bad show of intent, a truly worrying symptom of current politics. It opens doors better left closed…

The problem with ACTA is that many of the clauses are very much open to interpretation and often times only understandable if you have all the protocols - which are not available to the public.

However there is a petition by law professors against ACTA coordinated by Prof. Metzger of the University of Hanover and signed by practically all leading German professors in the field of IT law. (See: http://www.iri.uni-hannover.de/acta-1668.html)

Thank you, their published opinion (http://www.iri.uni-hannover.de/tl_files/pdf/ACTA_opinion_110...) looks interesting.

The problem with ACTA is that it's not even democratically enacted. It was negotiated in secrecy to the point that the Obama administration said it couldn't be disclosed for reasons of national security. It's a travesty on every level, and its promulgators should be publicly shamed.

I wouldn't call her a leftist, she's just the last liberal who knows what liberalism means. And the move didn't come from her but the federal foreign office.