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...

Comments

Harmful

[Nicholas Evans]

If this gets harmful, I don't even want to know what gets damaging.

Outsource!!

[gnuman99]

Now we can outsource all the OSS projects to India. Nothing to worry about! :)

Innovation [noun] - the different ways that one may file a patent and/or sue for profit.

What everyone needs to do is

[Knight55]

to start filing patents like mad. They're the new gold.