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The EU's Answer To The DMCA

Posted by timothy on from the not-a-parody dept.

blowdart writes: "You thought the DCMA was bad? Well EU Directive 2001/29/EU is due to be passed into individual country law next year. According to an article on silicon.com, it will make it "a criminal offence to break or attempt to break the copy protection or access control systems on digital content such as music, videos, eBooks, and software", and was passed without public debate. According to silicon.com, if the directive is applied in law without changes, we in Europe may face our own versions of Dmitri Sklyarov's prosecution. It gets more draconian, legitimate copying activity, such as teachers copying materials for their students or blind people making Braille copies of their work, could also become illegal, as could encryption research. The actual directive is available in HTML. So, who knows enough about european law to tell us if we should be worried or not?"

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Look here too by musicmaster · · Score: 2, Informative

    Instead of www.eurorights.org you can better look at uk.eurorights.org. The site of the UK branch is much more developped as the central site.

  2. Anything for lawful purpose permitted by Schoinobates+Volans · · Score: 2, Informative
    1. Temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable:
    • (a) a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or
    • (b) a lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made, and which have no independent economic significance, shall be exempted from the reproduction right provided for in Article 2.

    So using Elcosoft's software for lawfull uses (transferring from one PC you own to another you own, from you PC to you PDA, ...) can not be forbidden by the copyright holder. Seem much more reasonable to me than DMCA.

    Additionally, article 5, item 1.c, specifically addresses the teacher case, 3a the scientific research case (and even putting copyrighted material in a scientific article), 3b the blind people case, ...

    Article 6, item 4 says that anti-copy protection can not prevent authorized copies (such those mentioned before)

    Read it, it is interesting, and not that long (skip the 62 "whereas"es, they are not)