Analysis of draft IP enforcement directive

The EU parliament Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market will
vote on 11 September on the proposed EU Directive on the enforcement of
intellectual property rights.

The Directive proposes to harmonize IP law in such a way that all
enforcement measures available to IP owners in any EU member state must be
available in all of them.

UK security researcher Ross Anderson has published an analysis of the
proposed EU Directive. At present, copyright infringement is treated by
most member states as a civil matter in general. The Directive would compel
every member state to criminalize all violations of intellectual property
that are deliberate and conducted in the course of a business.

The proposed Directive gives a ‘Right of Information’ to the music and film
industry which is a quasi-automatic right to the personal data of alleged
infringers, without filing a lawsuit. The proposal will have serious
consequences for the privacy of P2P users and will give the entertainment
industry direct access to names and addresses of users.

Anderson sums up the consequences for privacy, culture, universities,
libraries and the disabled, software competition and the single market.

The Draft IP Enforcement Directive – A Threat to Competition and Liberty
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/draftdir.html

Enforcement of intellectual property rights
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/indprop/piracy/index.htm