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UK Prepares Own Version of the DMCA

Posted by michael on from the bow-to-the-inevitable dept.

philkerr writes "I've just been informed by the UK Patent Office, below, that the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive, the equivalent EU legislation to the DMCA) consultation paper has been released. It's important that we give feedback to the UK government that this legislation will have a chilling effect on the software industry." NTK has a few choice words on the subject as well. We've done several articles on the EUCD before, and Alan Cox has been campaigning against it, but it appears that the fix is in: Europe is going to get DMCA-like laws implemented in each nation by the end of 2002.

1 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Your views CAN have an impact..... by mickwd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For all you cynics out there that think you can't do anything to stop this:

    1) The UK Patent Office undertook a consultation exercise into extending European patent law to cover software and business methods in the same way as in the US. They only had 285 responses - 241 individuals and 44 organisations. See their conclusions from the exercise. In particular:

    "To extend patentability so that these developers have to divert time and effort into making sure they are not infringing patents, and seeking and enforcing them, would impose a major burden. The necessary case for believing that a significant extension of patentability would increase innovation in this field simply has not been made. In fact, as many respondents suggested, it could have the opposite effect."

    They will have an influence on the European patent office. Other influences may prove stronger - the battle is not yet over.

    2) A couple of months ago, the government in the UK was planning on making everyone's phone records (including mobile phone location data) and internet data (URLs visited and emails sent and received (header details, I think - not sure) available to many government departments, local councils and even private utility companies. There was a large outcry here. People were encouraged to fax and write to their MPs. What happened? The legislation was withdrawn, and the minister responsible, David Blunkett (a SENIOR government minister) even apologised about it.

    Yes, these ARE different issues. But when a change in the law like this is being proposed, if you go about it in the correct manner you can have a (small) influence on what happens. If enough people get involved, you can have a major influence.