p2pnet.net News:- February 23, Brussels.

It’s getting close - the date and place slated for what will probably be the last open public debate involving the European Commission, Parliament and Council on the the European Union’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.

P2p file-sharers and non-commercial infringers have unwittingly become the intended targets of the directive - and ordinary consumers are caught in the crossfire, as IP Justice executive director Robin Gross sums it up here.

This directive creates the ‘nuclear weapons’ of law enforcement that will be used by recording industry executives to combat infringement,” Gross declares.

Due to go to full debate in the EU Plenary on March 8-11, “It combines the most extreme enforcement provisions found throughout Europe and imposes them collectively onto all of Europe, for example England’s Anton Pillar orders that would permit recording industry executives to raid and ransack the homes of alleged users of file-sharing software or it’s Mareva injunctions that would freeze the bank accounts of alleged infringers without a hearing.

“These powerful provisions must be limited to appropriate circumstances, such as cases committed for commercial purposes, or this powerful arsenal will be unleashed against average consumers who nominally infringe with no commercial purpose or gain.”

Gross says while some progress has been made in recent weeks to reign in a few of the directive’s provisions, “its dangerously bloated scope remains a major concern for consumers,” to maintain a balance between consumer rights and the legitimate enforcement of intellectual property rights, “the directive must be narrowed to cases involving commercial infringement or counterfeiting only”.

A while back BBC technology analyst Bill Thompson expressed his own concerns as someone who’d been known both to download remixes of the White Stripes or old Velvet Underground numbers (”please don’t judge me too harshly - it’s my age”).

“I don’t want to go to jail just because I share a few songs online in the way that I’ve shared cassette tapes and videos for years, and I don’t see why copyrights in music, movies or software should be enforced with criminal sanctions when my rights to make reasonable and fair use of the same material are taken away from me,” he said.

“If I was sitting in a warehouse in Bristol making thousands of copies of the new Sophie Ellis-Bextor album, then I’d hold my hands up when the police came knocking at the door, but making a copy so my daughter can listen to it on her own CD player doesn’t seem like breaking the law to me.

“Or, I suspect, to many other people outside the record industry.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2004 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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