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New EU IP Law Deemed Harmful
JPMH writes "The Register is reporting on this alert from FFII about a new EU Directive on IP enforcement due to go to the Parliament legal affairs sub-committee on Monday, and full Plenary in two weeks time. The detailed text of the measure was only published on Tuesday. FFII says that without better defined safeguards the Directive will lead to a far more agressive, lawyer-driven legal environment for creative businesses. Having seen how similar legislation is used in the United States, FFII fears that it will provide the perfect means for agressive litigators holding dubious intellectual property rights to "pull a SCO" and use the powers of the Directive to seriously harass and damage small open-source projects and innovative businesses. FFII has a list of MEPs to contact here." The law has been described as a DMCA on steroids. We've reported on this before, but it bears repeating...
I relize that Patents are different from Copyright in that patents must be defended to remain valid.. But does it prevent any $0 licence?
Patents do not necessarily need to be defended to remain valid. In fact the presumption is that they do not. It might even be fair to say that the way things are right now most patents aren't defended. They just sit in the vault until the time is right.
You'll find many of the morally offensive legal battles going on right now are over patents that sat latent for years before the holder decided to file a suit against someone with money.
However, a good many patents are also given a public license, a $0 grant of use. The idea is not only valid but widely used.
But, patents are not like copyright which simply exist from the moment of creation. Obtaining a patent is a legal process which is time consuming and costly. While it is practical for a rich corporation with a flock of its own patent attorneys to file patent claims by the wheelbarrow full, the independent inventor may not have the means to file a single patent, even on a very lucrative invention.
And then yes, holding a patent is pointless if you can't defend it. Obtaining a patent might only cost a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. Defending one against Sony or Microsoft might well cost millions.
It's a sticky wicket I'm afraid.
KFG
On the other hand, defending a patent is not necessarily expensive, because most alleged infringers would rather settle than litigate. Litigation costs millions for the defendant as well as the plaintiff, and the infringer can have huge potential liability (otherwise, the patentee wouldn't have gone to trial), say tens of millions of dollars.
With great power comes great fan noise.
They haven't - that was multinational government, what this is is something quite different. This is getting other countries to agree to the rules the US wants, not getting the US to agree to a consensus.
You misunderstood the case. This IPR Enforcement directive is NOT about the legal validity of software patents. The software patents directive was corrected by the EU parliament in September and is is going to be "recorrected" by the council, so the main focus of FFII laid on this.
SO FFII and all the others (AEL, EF Finland ecc.) defend the current corrected former swpat directive.
The IRP enforcement directive is about enforcement, giving power to the rights owner, orginally against product privacy some persons introduced DRM, TCPA ecc. This was already removed. The problem is as so many different spheres of law are comprised by the unscientific, unjudicial term Intellectual property rules that apply well for product privacy cause much trouble for patent enforcement. FFII UK explains this very good on their site.
There are several groups that critizise the directive, FFII has a moderate position as they are in favour of copyright. I suggest you to read the current council draft of the directive by yourself and look for problems. You can easily see in the proposal that it is premature. The language used is often inappropriate and infringes on certain legal standards.
Good news: DRM and TCPA was deleted, most groups were concerned about this, so the directive already failed from the viewpoint of those who drafted it. We won! So let's get rid of the ugly rest.
"Article 21
Legal protection of technical devices
Deleted"
But this does not mean that it will not be reintroduced by MEP amendments ecc. Criticism of the directive goes trough all parlamentary groups.
What FFII wants get out is that the directive also apply for patent legislation. Because patent infringements are very easy and criminal sanctions against patent legislation may be a danger for business. This is also the industry position. FFII is no mayor player in the IPR Enforcement debate. Most was done by IPjustice or other DRM activists. FFII was very busy with the swpat directive, so they could not devote time to the IPr enforcement directive or ENISA.
91/EC/250 is the EU directive on copyright and the exemptions under which copyright law CANNOT BE ENFORCED.
specifically, interfaces between software-software, software-hardware and hardware-hardware are EXEMPT from copyright law.
whereas number 15.
it says that the new directive is "without prejudice" to 91/EC/250.
True, but there are still 30,000 granted software patents in Europe, and the industry giants are pushing very hard on the EU Council of Ministers to reverse the Parliament vote. The implications are potentially very frightening, if the sort the enforcement measures proposed in this Directive become available for use by any agressive litigation company acting on the basis of a dodgy software patent. So I think Aurix's comment connecting this with software patents is right on the mark.
As to FFII's position: FFII is strongly in favour of copyright, and FFII is strongly against piracy.
We think copyright is the right way to build a fair information infrastructure. We are vehemently against commercial software being ripped off and placed on warez networks; and we are vehemently against GPL software being ripped off by closed source companies. But there has to be a balance between the interests of supposed rightsholders (often very powerful) and the interests of other creative companies against wrongful claims of infringement.
It's not just about patents. We're also very concerned about the possibility of these measures being used in disputed copyright cases, disputed trademark cases, disputed cases about claimed confidential information... etc, etc, etc. Under Article 2, the Directive could be applied to "any [claimed] infringement of intellectual property rights as provided for by Community law and/or by the national law of the Member State concerned" -- ie at the moment the whole of Intellectual Property law could be grounds for initiating these measures.
That is why we believe it would be safest if the directive were to be sharply reined in, and apply only to commercially organised, knowingly intentional copyright and trademark infringement.