The EU parliament Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market will vote on 11 September on the proposed EU Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
The Directive proposes to harmonize IP law in such a way that all enforcement measures available to IP owners in any EU member state must be available in all of them.
UK security researcher Ross Anderson has published an analysis of the proposed EU Directive. At present, copyright infringement is treated by most member states as a civil matter in general. The Directive would compel every member state to criminalize all violations of intellectual property that are deliberate and conducted in the course of a business.
The proposed Directive gives a 'Right of Information' to the music and film industry which is a quasi-automatic right to the personal data of alleged infringers, without filing a lawsuit. The proposal will have serious consequences for the privacy of P2P users and will give the entertainment industry direct access to names and addresses of users.
Anderson sums up the consequences for privacy, culture, universities, libraries and the disabled, software competition and the single market.
The Draft IP Enforcement Directive - A Threat to Competition and Liberty
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/draftdir.html
Enforcement of intellectual property rights
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/indprop/piracy/index.htm