EU Approves New Stricter Anti-Piracy Directive

A Pirate writes "The European Parliament has voted for the new report submitted by Italian parliament member Nicola Zingaretti that criminalize even attempts to infringe on copyrights. Even if the new directive excludes end-users from the law it will still criminalize sites like YouTube and practically all P2P services, and even the developers of these services. The exceptions beside the end-users' personal use, includes studies and research. While the European Parliament apparently describes the new directive as a an attempt to harmonize the copyright laws of the European Countries others have been describing it as a lobby directive."

Comments

Re:I don't understand: isn't this good?

[vivaoporto]

Exactly, and it shows how much editorialized is Slashdot these days, trying to make everyone else look worse so U.S. doesn't look so bad. Take a look at this other submission, in the firehose:

andyteleco writes "Yesterday, 25/04/2007, the European Parliament voted in favour of a proposal to modify the EU Parliament and Congress directive regarding penal measures destined to enforce Intellectual Property rights. the directive finally establishes in Article 3 that the member states will be responsible of considering as a criminal infraction all intentional IP offences committed at a commercial scale, as well as complicity and/or incitement to these offences. According to Amendment 13, Article 2 of the directive excludes culpability of the acts performed by private users for personal non-profit usage. Read the entire text"

So now E.U. citizens have the explicit right to make private copies for personal non-profit usage (something in line with the Betamax decision on U.S.), but infringement, complicity and incitement to infringement on commercial scale now holds harsher penalties. Slashdot groupthink like to imagine that they are the center of the world, and every piece of legislation is there to restrict their freedom, is aimed to them but in fact, this legislation main target is not even technological "IP" infringement, but good and old school counterfeiting of goods like clothes, bag and perfumes, that happens to be a big issue to France, for instance.

I'm all for both freedom for private personal copies and jail penalty for petty criminals that sell counterfeit CDs, DVDs and Dolce&Galbanna clothes on flea markets. The fact that this legislation could be interpreted as bad for the likes of YouTube is purely incidental, a side effect that can or cannot be interpreted this way. Now, cut this "MPAA bought E.U." bullshit. You nerds are not the center of the world, and pointing fingers to Venezuela, China, Brazil, E.U., Iran will not make U.S. problems go away.