The EU is moving closer to adoption of a new law that makes many forms of intellectual property infringement criminal rather than civil offenses. The first version of the new IP law, IPRED, did not contain criminal penalties, but those penalties show up again in a new version of the legislation, commonly called IPRED2. Consumer advocates worry that vague wording will make ISPs responsible for pirated files passing through their networks.
In a vote today, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee adopted a set of amendments to the proposed legislation rather than discarding it, as some MEPs wanted. The Criminal Sanctions Directive now enforces piracy and counterfeiting laws with enhanced criminal protections, though the law does not currently apply to patents.
Just before the vote, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure’s (FFII) Ante Wessels commented that US content owners were pushing the bill. "Unfortunately," he wrote, "one strong pressure group is quite happy with this turn of events: Hollywood and the music industry. They want to equate the younger music-downloading generation with industrial pirates, and let the police take over prosecutions which hurt their public image. They push for the weakest possible definitions, in order to criminalize end users and hold software providers liable. Hollywood has been calling Members of the Legal Affairs Committee daily."
But Hollywood didn’t get its way. Copyrights, trademarks, and designs are protected with fines and jail time, but they apply only to "commercial" infringement. An amendment adopted by the committee states that "this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profits purposes." This doesn’t appear to make file-sharing legal, though, as current civil laws still seem to apply. Criminal penalties might be leveled at ISPs, though, depending on how courts interpret the law.
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The judges in Europe generally seemed to be slightly less block headed than their American counterparts. Let’s hope this continues where this issue is concerned should the worst case scenero happens.