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/gplv3http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org