[SC.LUG] Fw: [Fsfe-uk] April 25th vote on the criminalisation directive (IPRED2)

[Richard Smedley]

Begin forwarded message:

Date: 13 Apr 2007 13:45:43 +0100
From: Ciaran O'Riordan <ciaran at fsfe.org>
To: fsfe-uk at gnu.org
Subject: [Fsfe-uk] April 25th vote on the criminalisation directive
(IPRED2)



The European Parliament seems set to vote on April 25th on the
directive to criminalise "aiding, abetting, or inciting" infringement
of copyright, trademarks, and patents.  (Called "IPRED2", but that's
not a good name because it spreads the "IP" confusion.)

I'm currently updating our page on this:
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ipred2/

There is broad support for removing patents, so that will probably
happen and doesn't need to be our focus.

We need to focus on removing the crimes of "aiding, abetting, and
inciting" infringements, and limiting copyright and trademark
infringement criminalisation to cases such as large-scale fraud and
cases that case health or safety risks.

Very roughly, the reasons why free software supporters should be
interested in this are:

* Developers of filesharing software, maybe including webservers, could
  be accused of the new crimes of "attempting, aiding, abetting, or
  inciting" copyright infringement - and investigations of these
accusations would be paid for by the national governments because, as
crimes, the police would have a duty to investigate

* Software projects may be required to implement functionality to
prevent the use of the software for copyright infringing purposes

* Directory services and search engines could be accused of the new
crimes listed above

* Free software alternatives to DRM-restricted software could be
accused of the above crimes.  For example, if Adobe's PDF reader
doesn't allow printing, but a free software PDF reader does, then the
latter could be accused of being a copyright infringement tool (even
though a user might only use it to print documents where the copyright
has expired or where printing is allowed by the licence of the document
they're viewing)


And the two main things to do are to sign this petition:
http://www.copycrime.eu/petition

And contact our MEPs and tell them to support amendment such as these:
http://action.ffii.org/ipred2/FFII_Analysis
(Unfortunatley, the most up to date amendments are only in MS Word
format)

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3 http://ciaran.compsoc.com/
_________ \  GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \   Fellowship:
http://www.fsfe.org


_______________________________________________
Fsfe-uk mailing list
Fsfe-uk at gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk


-- 
Richard Smedley,                                         rs at m6-it.org
Technical Director,                                     www.M6-IT.org
M6-IT CIC                                        +44 (0)779 456 07 14

Sustainable Third Sector IT solutions. PRINCE2[TM] Project Management
Web services * Back-ups * Support * Training & Certification * E-Mail


M6-IT is a Community Interest Company, limited by guarantee.
Registered in England & Wales,               Registration No: 6040154
11 St Marks Road, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY9 7DT

Northern Office: 4, Hollins Green, Bradwall, Cheshire, CW10 0LA.

Welsh office/Swyddfa Gogledd Cymru: e-mail / e-bost - cymru at m6-it.org