(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2), with the changes made by a report produced by Nicola Zingaretti (PES), was voted by the European Parliament in its first reading today with a vote a 374 in favour, 278 against and 17 abstentions.

Unfortunately, the suggestions from an alliance of libraries, consumers and innovators, including the 8 000 signatories of the petition at copycrime.eu were not considered by the Parliament, although the vote was much tighter than anticipated.

The scope of the directive still includes trade names, database and design rights, along with the copyright and trademarks. Liabilities for software and service providers are possible by criminalising also the inciting of an intellectual property right infringement.

Jonas Maebe, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) analyst commented: "Today, 'inciting' is only criminal in some member states, and in exceptional cases such as hate speech. Elevating IPRs to the same level is a scary development. The inciting clause is also reminiscent of the US 'Induce Act', which threatened to make MP3 players such as the iPod illegal"

The fight now moves to the Council of the European Union for its first reading, and then to the European Parliament for a second reading. Several states have started to mount resistance to IPRED2 in the last weeks, with the UK and Holland leading the charge.

European Parliament Criminalises Businesses, Consumers, Innovators (25.04.2007)
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/European_Parliament_Criminalises_...

IPRED2 Slips Through, Fight to Continue (25.04.2007)
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005219.php

Intellectual property: pirates and counterfeiters to feel the full weight of criminal law (25.04.2007)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/057-5723-113-...

Petition against IPRED2
http://www.copycrime.eu/petition

EDRI-gram : IPRED2 adopted by the EP Legal Affairs committee (28.02.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.6/ipred2