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)

Criminal Sanctions Rapporteur fails to protect European industry

(19.03.2007)

EC leaves personal use out of criminal IP laws ( 22.03.2007)

IPRED wiki – FFII

EDRI-Gram: ENDitorial :Constitution by criminalisation (31.01.2007)