BUSINESS
European IP law draws ire of activists
09-03-2004
by
Civil liberties groups in Europe were out in force in Strasburg, France, on Monday to protest the passage of a new intellectual-property directive.
The proposed law, called the European Union Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, has drawn the ire of consumer and civil rights groups, who say that the directive will give companies seeking to protect their intellectual property (IP) and trademarks too much power.
In an attempt to block its introduction, a number of groups including IP Justice, European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and others met in Strasburg, France, to oppose the introduction of the directive. The European Parliament debated the directive on Monday and is set to vote on it on Tuesday. If passed, it will go to Europe's Council of Ministers for a final vote on Thursday.
The directive is said to be a tougher version of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has been used by record companies to prosecute on-line song swappers and file-swapping services in the US. European officials involved in creating the proposed legislation, such as MEP Janelly Fourtou, wife of Vivendi Universal chief executive Jean-Rene Fourtou, have said that the directive is meant to extend well beyond music swapping.
Activists agree, claiming that the legislation could lead to midnight raids on private homes by corporations and state authorities in search of everything from pirated software and illegal music to fake Gucci bags or Rolex watches.
"Consumers oppose this directive because it treats them as if they were large commercial counterfeiters -- even for a single, unintentional, non-commercial infringement. The powerful new enforcement provisions it creates to combat infringement apply even to people who believed their activities were lawful," a collection of opposition groups calling itself the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) said on Monday.
The coalition says that the directive's scope should be narrowed to commercial infringements, and patents should be excluded from proposed law's remit. Other problems with the directive cited by the groups include provisions for private IP-enforcement police forces, no single definition for "intellectual property rights," powers given to IP-rights holders to obtain personal information on consumers, powers given to IP-rights holders to seize Internet Service Providers' (ISPs) hardware; and authority given to rights holders to freeze liquid assets of violators.
It is worth noting, however, that as many as 100 MEPs have shown at least some sympathy for the groups' causes and have promised to put forward amendments. Legal experts, for their part, have added that the law is not as draconian as the protesters suggest and many aspects of it will be toned down once they go before the courts.
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