• versione italiana

The Fourtou report passed the europarl and the council after closed trialogue meetings with the Council working party and the Commission and has to be implemented by the member states by June 2006.

Among the opposing votes were some also national groups of the large parties, for example french and the austrian social democrats also austrian conservatives.

The result means:

• The directive is very unclear, greatly divergent national implementations are likely. In general the result will be harsher enforcement all kinds of "intellectual property rights" (the scope of this term being unclear). The directive has no effect on substantive law (i.e. on what is patentable or otherwise ownable)
• Patents are included within the scope of the directive. This is of serious concern to all companies in the patent system and outside it (including software), given that patent litigation is regularly fraught with legal insecurity.

During the voting session, Neil MacCormick, scottish professor of law and MEP for Greens/EFA, raised the issue of family connections in relation to conflicts of interest. This is in the light of numerous recent articles highlighting Mrs Fourtou's husband being CEO of Vivendi Universal. EP president Pat Cox indicated that this would be raised in the Parliament Bureau.

This directive allows surprise raids on small software businesses in the middle of the night by private security firms on the flimsiest evidence; -- or alternatively, such operations could be allowed only in the most exceptional conditions, only by official authorities, and only on the basis of the highest standards of evidence.

html and data files which show the results per group and by coutnry are in: http://wiki.ael.be/uploads/IPR-allresults-2.0.zip

So over the next two years, we need to make absolutely sure that safeguards are written into every single one of the 25 different national implementations instead.

analysis on who and which party voted now on which amendment

• europarl site on the vote
• FFII UK
• Ael Wiki
• Criticism by Prof. Cornish, Hilty etc
• Annotated HTML version of Cornish/Hilty paper
• More critical papers, including by Georg Jakob, Austrian Chamber of Commerce etc

Information:

Malcolm Harbour and Arlene McCarthy now say that this is not about information goods but only about tangibles.

• wikipedia on IPR
• Sueddeutsche: Die Todfeinde -- Probleme der MI
• RMS: The Right to Read -- Richard Stallman's dystopia which illustrates the dangers of the path on which IPRED is moving Europe forward

Information about related Issues

Counter Activities:

• Protection of World Cultural Heritage(Apparently UNESCO declared Linux/FLOSS as such) (to make sure that also non-declared IP is protected and may not be exploited), protection of the public domain, traditional knowledge.

  In summer 2005 The European Commission, in a second basked to IPRED, reintroduced some provisions which the European Parliament had previously rejected, such as mandatory criminal sanctions for any intentional infringment of intellectual property.

  • http://wiki.ffii.org/Ipred0510En
  • http://wiki.ipred.org/

IPRED II