The final vote on two of the most controversial information society Directives, the Directive on Software Patents and the Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights has been delayed once more. The IPRE directive was withdrawn last minute from the 9 February plenary agenda of the European Parliament. On 6 February the Council presented a compromise.
The IPRE directive was designed to prevent piracy and counterfeiting in the EU, but the scope and criminal sanctions were extended to infringement of any IP right, for example to peer-to-peer file exchangers. The new scope was strongly criticised by consumer organisations, telecoms operators and internet service providers. They claimed it would force them into endless legal proceedings with representatives from the music and film industry. They demanded more consumer safeguards to ensure that a court case has actually been filed and a judge has weighed evidence before personal information should be disclosed about an alleged infringer.
In order to buy the Irish Presidency more time to secure a majority, Parliament decided to withdraw the intellectual property directive from its 9 February plenary agenda. The pressure is high to agree in so-called First Reading by the European Parliament, before new Member States join the European Union in June.
The Council now proposes to limit the scope of the Directive, leaving it up to the Member States to decide about possible criminal sanctions and deleting Article 21 and its ban on technical devices. The Commission (and Parliament rapporteur Mme Fourtou) originally proposed broad DMCA-like "anti-circumvention" measures to apply to devices protecting any type of intellectual property right.
The Competitiveness Council of Ministers was supposed to have voted on the Software Patent Directive on 27 November, but due to continuing controversy over the text and heated disagreements between the Parliament and the Commission, some Member States (most notably France, which wants to conduct further consultations with stakeholders) called for the Council vote to be postponed. The Council Common Position is now expected on 17 May 2004. The vote in plenary already took place on 24 September 2003. Parliament adopted a large number of amendments that limited the possibility of patenting computer-implemented inventions (See EDRI-gram nr 18, 25.09.2003).
EU Council Proposal on IPRE Directive (06.02.2004)
http://www.ipjustice.org/CODE/020604EUIPED.html
IP Justice comparison of the different proposals (05.02.2004)
http://www.ffii.org.uk/ip_enforce/IPJ_analysis.html
Consolidated version of the SoftPat vote (24.09.2003)
http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/plen0309/resu/index.en.ht...