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

Don't forget the children!

[fanpoe]

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.

Re:Don't forget the children!

[alphamugwump]

In my experience, the primary attraction of youtube is not the content at all, but the "community". It is difficult to understand until you try it, but posting videos can be incredibly entertaining, due to the amount of attention it is possible to get. With no mods, one can post anything at all that isn't actually obscene, which, practically speaking, makes youtube the perfect environment for a troll. Owing to the way the system counts views and comments (whether positive or not) and gives you honors, anything moderately inflammatory will easily get you on the most-discussed list. Simply put, youtube enables normal people have their own cadre of fanbois.

That's not to say that I haven't used youtube to watch whole TV series, but if all the copyrighted content were to disappear, I agree that they wouldn't be much affected.

Re:Don't forget the children!

[walnutmon]

I have no problem with the prosecution of these small time crooks, as long as the worst trouble you can get in for copyright infringement does not exceed the punishment for worse laws... which I would say includes just about everything...

The people who whine about this shit don't understand that it just isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. A very small amount of the population stands to lose, while more of the population stands to gain. But I think that if you get 3 years for copyright infringement and 1 year for beating your wife or six months for aggrivated assault, then there is something seriously wrong with the system. It means that the money being lobbied is more important than the welfare of the people in a country.

Nothing new in our modern civilized societies though. Ick... that sounded bitter.

Copyright as an election issue

[hellsDisciple]

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?

Re:No more laws

[aitikin]

The problem then arises that things such as education, parks, police, and anything else that isn't quite so important to the general public goes down hill, or at least that's what would happen here "in the colonies."

The general public has a tendency to not want to spend money on anything that doesn't directly effect them, so they won't care if the police department looses its funding unless they've recently been robbed, they won't care about the money going to schools unless they currently have or plan on having kids in the immediate future, they won't care about the parks unless they live by them. This would only pose more problems in the long run unless the general public suddenly becomes smart, which I don't think can happen.

As the T-shirt reads, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

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

[cyclop]

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?

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.

Re:No more laws

[jez9999]

I urge everyone to vote Lib Dem. They're committed to improving the electoral system (check out the 'better governance' consultation paper), which includes implementing a system of proportional representation. This is the foundation for good government. They may well have policies that you disagree with; I don't like their fondness for the EU, nor their support of Labour's road charging idea. However we only need them in office for 1 or 2 terms to fix our godawful electoral system, and then we can actually start voting for parties that are actually GOOD, and our vote will be useful. Vote Lib Dem.