IPRED2 adopted by the EP Legal Affairs committee

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The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee has adopted on 20 March
2007 the draft IPRED directive following the opinions presented by MEP
Nicola Zingaretti, with some important amendments though.

The good news is that the very controversial definition of “commercial
scale infringement”, that previously included the IPRs (Intellectual
Property Rights) infringements by private users for personal use, was
detailed and now the text refers to a criminal infringement as “a deliberate
and conscious infringement of the intellectual property right for the
purpose of obtaining commercial advantage.”

The patents and utility models have been excluded from the scope of the
directive. From the unexamined IPRs, design rights, database rights, and
possibly rights related to semiconductor topographies are still in.

The bad news is that definitions are kept vague, the Committee considering
that the European Court of Justice should interpret them.

The provision that criminalizes aiding and abetting or inciting to infringe
an intellectual property right was kept in the text, even though it was a
large consensus among the industry members (from open source software
supporters to major software companies lobbyists) that this text is an
important threat to every company in the software and the Internet industry.

Also, the recommendations made by Max Planck Institute and Chartered
Institute of Patent Agents regarding the necessary definitions in order to
clearly limit the directive to piracy cases, were not included in the
adopted report.

FFII warned even before the session that the Rapporteur failed to protect
the European industry and citizens. Pieter Hintjens, FFII president, said:
“The proposed text is an undetermined and shoddy draft which pleases only
one party, but will harm many others. The rapporteur failed to choose for
the European industry, and his last minute changes are making the situation
even worse. He had a year to fix this text but seems to be unable to work
out a sensible compromise. This sharply contrasts with the Industry
Committee’s rapporteur David Hammerstein, who managed to obtain support from
all political groups for a fairly balanced text.”

EU Weighs Copyright Law (20.03.2007)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129995/article.html

Criminal Sanctions Rapporteur fails to protect European industry
(19.03.2007)
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/Criminal_Sanctions_Rapporteur_fails_to_protect_European_industry

EC leaves personal use out of criminal IP laws ( 22.03.2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/22/ec_ip_incite/

IPRED wiki – FFII
http://www.ipred.org/

EDRI-Gram: ENDitorial :Constitution by criminalisation (31.01.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.2/enditorial