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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."
From the fine article
The EP.....decided that criminal sanctions should apply only to infringements deliberately carried out to obtain a commercial advantage. Piracy committed by private users for personal, non-profit purposes is therefore
I see a lot of commentary around the web that YouTube's only valid business model is due to turning a blind eye to uploaded copyrighted clips. Having seen how my stepsons use YouTube and similar sites I am not at all convinced that this is the case. They are quite happy with the user generated content.
A Prayer to the Omnipotent FSM
Funny how politicians go up for election claiming this, that and the other - usually things like tax, education, health and transport. Then suddenly once they're in, enforcing draconian controls on digital media is what's important - would they get in if that's what they said up front?
I want a new directive. One that bans all member states from making any new laws for the next ten years.
Think about this for a second, think of one piece of legislation passed in the last ten years that has positively impacted anyone you know in the first world? I can't think of a single thing, not one, nothing. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part but on the whole laws in the last ten years have been mostly negative.
Maybe voting is declining in Britain not because of athapy, per se, but because people like myself our realizing the truth. Our politicians are powerless - they can't do a thing to change the plight of the average person on the street. They can raise taxes, lower taxes, pass all sorts of laws but they can't stop the dickheads burning people's bins or the fourteen year olds buying cider to vomit up on the street.
In short, what's the point in voting when both parties are equally as corrupt and when the decisions taken there never effect you? It's a powerful argument but not one I personally agree with. I vote not for myself but because a great many lives were lost trying to defend that vote. The tragedy is that this generation has come to find that their vote would be more productively used as toilet paper than a means of expressing your opinion.
We need a new sort of politics. A politics where local issues and common people are listened to. A politics where the career of the politician matters less than serving their constituents. A politics where issues are not decided based on the party your belong to but what improves the lives of the people of the country. We need a politics where an honest politician is not considered an oxymoron. We need a rupture from the past and we need it more urgently than ever before.
Simon.
"Harmonizing" only means that laws in different EU countries are brought to par so that every country has the same law. Now, lobbies have more or less power in various countries. In general, you can be fairly certain, though, that companies that invested a lot of money into laws in one country won't allow this to change and get more lenient, thus the politicians of the countries with a lot of lobby influence tend to be quite vocal to get their law pushed up to EU levels.
I mean, don't bite the hand that feeds you. Makes sense, doesn't it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Inciting or abetting or aiding a copyright infringement is also a crime.
Windows contains a CD ripper, there is no fair use in EU law, you are not allowed to rip CD, Windows is a commercial product, this fits the commercial scale aiding of piracy. It is no different from any other copying device. So how about we demand the criminal prosecution of Microsoft?
BSA was a strong backer of this law, essentially to protect Windows. So it would be fitting if we could get Microsoft as it's first victim. Nokia next, their phones can play MP3s. They also backed this law.
You may have difficulty getting enforcement, since this is a dipshit law and the policemen know it, but you can often file Ombudsman complaints against the police if they fail to enforce the law in some cases but not others.
This is a golden time, every major backer of this law is guilty of some infringement of it. You don't even need to be the copyright holder to file a complaint under this law! How cool is that? A law so vague every MP3 makers, duplicating machine maker, computer maker, phone maker, search engine maker, is guilty of violating it.
I fear the day that someone develops a nice killer app that turns out (entirely unexpectedly and unintentionally) to fuel piracy.
It could be a blog software with a vulnerability that some dev has no time to fix, or it could be some new secure p2p IM service with a casual file transfer built in. Any other software manifestation that carries with it honestly wonderful intentions can be construed as criminal in the hands of its users.
How does the opensource community, comprised of software authors with no legal protection, manage to protect their continued activities? Does anyone else fear the implications this has for entire opensource OS's and kernels that could somehow be construed as having code that "aids piracy" in some remote fashion? Softmac support in the form of people on wifi hotspots is one example I can think of.
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
The FFII and the Vrijschrift.org Foundation tell us some more about how bad it could be.
The big one as far as I'm concerned is ``incitement to infringe'', which could open software writers to massive problems.
In the name of providing video sharing services or Search engines, these sites indulge in mass copyright violation that requires the owners of copyrights (server admins) to set things like robots.txt etc.
Having said that, I can see where you are coming from in that such sites do enable the uninformed or unconcerned to infringe on others' copyrights. However such sites also have a legitimate use as venues for user generated content. The UGC on such sites may not interest you but, to judge my stepsons behaviour and that of their friends, there is an upcoming generation that does appreciate it and is more willing to create content rather than just be a passive consumer. As far as I'm concerned this is a positive thing and criminalising the video sharing sites to protect the rights of big business is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are always those looking for a free ride. You do what you can to reduce such attempts so that whatever you are doing is worth while and live with the rest. (Unless you work for big media businesses in the 21st century in which case you try to buy politicians and laws to put budding competitors out of the picture.)
A Prayer to the Omnipotent FSM
I'm all for legalizing free, noncommercial share of copyrighted information (that is, what it's called "end user piracy" today). As far as TFA says, it seems Europe now explicitely protects the end user right to share copyrighted information: something that previous Italian legislation, for example, explicitely *criminalized*, instead.
It seems to me that the law bans commercial, money-making piracy (that's OK for me). As for the "banning p2p software", I've not found clear references. Can someone explain me better?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
How long will it be until thoughtcrime becomes a punishable offense?
Excepting end-users doesn't alleviate this at all, especially since almost all end-users also upload copyrighted material in todays P2P networks (hence the acronym).
Since anyone can write a simple P2P system in a few hours and using just a few hundred lines of code, and since such a client could be applied for all kinds of legal and sensible uses like distributing patches, podcasts, etc, I find it a horrible idea to potentially send people to prison for writing such a system.
I agree that copyright infringement should be punished, but in light of the high usage of P2P systems no government acting in the interest of its people should criminalize such huge percentage of the people it represents. There has to be a real compromise between the content creators/owners and the end-users in whose interest governments should ultimately act. And sending people to prison or fining them many thousands of euros for illegally downloading digital content just doesn't seem that interest-protecting for the people to me!
When I hear the word "harmonise", I usually think of things being harmonious... however, what happens in looney Euroland is that harmonisation of laws results in things becoming equally bad for everyone... things never become less restrictive, they always manage to find a way for all the most restrictive laws to be kept and amalgated into the new "harmonised" version...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The answer in *most* cases is 'only in the past'.
I don't tend to pirate software any more, as there's simply no need. There is an OSS tool for just about every job, and many of them are getting to the point (finally) where they're actually up to the standard of commercial software.
The only commercial software I need tends to be small utilities (which usually have an honest developer who deserves the money) and Windows (It's too much like hard work to pirate it and keep it up to date anyway)
Music - rips are very often bad quality or difficult to get hold of - if it's available on iTunes for 99p then I'm willing to pay that to save the hassle.
Which just leaves anime. I must admit, although fansubs are technically illegal (presumably) I greatly prefer them to dubs. And the easiest way to get 'em is to download 'em. If Jump were to supply downloadable subs of Naruto themselves (translated in a proper fan-like fashion, not a dub-like one i.e. I don't want to read "Believe It!" every 10 seconds) then by all means the money would be theirs.
They have voted to pass it on it's first reading. It still has some way to go yet before it becomes an actual directive, and there is still plenty of opportunity for it to be rejected or heavily ammended.
I would point out that most member states of the EU already crimialize "comercial" copyright infringment, and thus this could be seen as an attempt to "harmonizing" EU wide law. I would also point out the proposed directive would require member states to ensure fair use rights, something several member states don't do, starting with the U.K.
This is the reply I received from my Lib Dem MEP, Graham Watson, who is leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, to an email I sent him urging him to support amendments to the directive. I think he has quite a good grasp of the issue, and when they failed to get all the amendments included, they voted against.
Interestingly, my UKIP MEP, Roger Knapman, also voted against...
Thank you for your email of 23rd April 2007 regarding the directive on
criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property
rights. The infringement of intellectual property rights, such as
counterfeiting and piracy is a growing phenomenon which has a serious
economic effect on the global scale. The Commission proposed this directive
to offer additional provisions to strengthen and improve the fight against
systematic infringement of intellectual property rights.
Although I am not a member of the Legal Affairs committee which has
discussed this directive, I am indeed aware of the matter and share a number
of your concerns about its current drafting. There is general agreement to
remove patents from the scope of the directive, and I believe it should be
further restricted. To this end, my Liberal Democrat colleague Sharon Bowles
MEP tabled a number of amendments for the vote in the European Parliament
which are concurrent with the aims of the Librarians', Consumers' and
Innovators' Coalition amendments.
I understand that Sharon has sought to address the current wording of
Article 3 which stipulates that "Member States shall ensure that all
intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial
scale, and attempting, aiding of abetting and inciting such infringements,
are treated as criminal offences". In its place, Sharon proposed that
"Member States shall ensure that all intentional infringements of an
intellectual property right on a commercial scale, or wilfully and
specifically aiding of abetting or inciting such infringements, are treated
as criminal offences when there are aggravating circumstances of organised
crime, counterfeiting, piracy or serious risk to health or safety". This
clarifies that innocent or unknowing assistance to infringe is not covered
and also restricts the scope of offences to which criminality could apply.
A second concern is one of definitions. Although I gather the Librarians',
Consumers' and Innovators' Coalition amendments have done a fair job at
establishing definitions, I do believe it far better to remove the
definitions from the text completely. This to my mind is safer and allows
judges to dismiss cases that might otherwise be caught by specific
definitions. For this reason I supported Sharon's amendment which eliminates
definitions.
Unfortunately, in the vote in the European Parliament on Wednesday 25th
April, a number of these amendments did not pass and subsequently the Group
I lead voted against the directive. But, realistically I believe there is
some way to go before we will know the final shape of this legislation as
this is just the first reading but I hope this answer is reassuring that
Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament take your concerns seriously.
Please do not hesitate to get in touch should you require further
information.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Watson MEP
Member of the European Parliament for South West England and Gibraltar
and Leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe
There are some important parts there, that helps to clarify and protect private copying, while harmonizing the legislation among the members states to fight the real threat that this legislation aims: counterfeiting of real world trademarked and copyrighted goods. Here are some important parts of this amendments:
Now, again, let's comment on that. How is that bad for fair use, private copying, etc? It is exactly THE OPPOSITE of what is being stated in the summary of this article, it defines explicitly fair use, right to private copying and creates a legal framework for the IP holders to be able to assert their rights, while protecting the citizens against baseless suits.
And, as a side effect of that, it legalizes the legal parallel importing of goods, making the ones like Lik Sung (sic) to be able to operate on E.U. territory. See below:
The unfortunate reality is that with the typical electoral system in the west, each election is decided on the basis of a very small number of very high profile issues. Things like economics, "defence", healthcare, and crime are tried and tested. Trendy issues — currently it's anything environmental over here in the UK — can also register significantly. However, minor things that still affect many people every day are rarely even considered. This is how things like IP and road traffic laws can reach a point where a very significant proportion of the population are criminalised for doing something that a majority of the population does not believe to be ethically wrong.
This will probably continue as long as we have this bizarre idea that politicians can predict before the election what will happen throughout their entire term of office. That simply isn't possible, unless their policies are never going to change depending on context. Consider the unpredictability of a world stock market crash or a plane flying into an iconic building, and unsurprisingly the reality doesn't always match up. It is silly to expect that it ever will, and we would do far better if political manifestos set out the principles and values supported by the each candidate, and reserved concrete policies for examples: "Under the current circumstances, I would therefore support this measure to provide further financial support to that group." We also need to get over this idea that any politician who changes his or her position on an issue is "doing a U-turn" and doesn't know what they stand for. Maybe the circumstances just changed? Maybe they came across better information, and revised their opinion in light of it? These are good things for politicians to do, as long as their actions are consistent with the principles and values for which they stood at election time. The idea that all politicians should have evaluated all information on all issues comprehensively before every decision they are asked to make is simply unrealistic, and I would rather vote for someone who acknowledged this and made a genuine effort to dot the right thing than someone who pretended they were omniscient and used this to attack their more considerate opposition.
Of course, such a principled election system would also show up some other problems with "representative" democracy in places like the US and UK today. As far as I can see, the major political parties in these countries are so closely aligned on many issues that someone who is fairly central but tends towards individual responsibility and capitalism rather than socialism and a large government simply has no-one to vote for who will argue their case. Given the barriers to entry in starting a new political party, this means a significant proportion of the population's voice is never heard.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.