There will be no criminal sanctions in the proposed European directive on
the enforcement of intellectual property rights after all. In the previous
edition of EDRI-gram there was a report about an amendment of MEP Mercedes
Echerer (Greens, Austria) on Article 20 that would re-introduce sanctions
in criminal law, even for private and relatively small-scale infringements.

As it turned out, Mrs. Echerer later withdrew this amendement and replaced
it with a much much milder one, deleting the criminal law sanctions and
calling merely for 'appropriate sanctions'. The secretariat of the Legal
Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament could not keep up with
the different amendments from the Austrian MEP, and put an old version on

The Norwegian Jon Johansen pleaded 'not guilty' during the retrial on 2 December of his acquittal for reverse-engineering DVD technology and creating DeCSS in 1999. DeCSS is computer software that Johansen and others wrote in an effort to build an independent DVD player for the Linux operating system.

In January 2003, a three-judge panel in Oslo rejected charges against Johansen for accessing his DVD movies using an independently created DVD player. The court also rejected Hollywood's claim that it has the right to control the way in which an individual views a DVD after purchase.

The charges against Johansen were brought under the Norwegian criminal code section 145.2, which outlaws bypassing technological restrictions to access data that one is not entitled to access. Johansen's prosecution is

On 27 November the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament finally voted on the Draft Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. The vote was a total victory for the Rapporteur, French Conservative Janelly Fourtou. Every single one of her amendments passed, and so did all of the compromise amendments she had worked out with other MEPs. There is no official version of the report as amended now - it has to be prepared by the JURI Secretariat from circa 250 pages of amendments and a 19-page list on the outcome of the vote. It can, however, already be concluded that the amended version is even more unproportional than it looked in worst-case scenarios during the weeks preceding the vote - and that is not entirely the fault of Mrs Fourtou, but also of a Green MEP from Austria called Mercedes Echerer.

The vote on the Draft Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, originally foreseen for the meeting of the Judicial Affairs Committee of the European Parliament last Monday, has been postponed again. The Rapporteur, Janelly Fourtou (Conservative, France) had to give in to a request for delay supported by a majority composed of Social Democrats, Liberals, Greens and the Left. They argued more discussion was necessary to be able to understand the problems in connection with the Directive.

The next date scheduled for the vote in committee is 27 November, in Brussels.

On 4 November there was a heated debate in the Judicial Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament about the proposed new directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. According to Social Democrat Willy Rothley from Germany "the EU Commission aggressively attempts to exceed its authorities and assume competencies it does not hold. Senselessly, it deals with lawmaking as though it were a patchwork quilt, and thus actually destroys the law."

Other MEPs from the four biggest political groups - Conservatives (PPE), Social Democrats (PSE), Liberals (ELDR) and Greens alike - joined Mr. Rothley in his criticism of the Commission which, according to most of them, just hasn't done its homework in the drafting of this Directive.

Last Monday, the European Parliament's Judicial Affairs Committee (JURI) should have discussed its Report on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. But the agenda was so overcrowded that the Rapporteur, French MEP Janelly Fourtou, could only make some introductory remarks before the session was over.

Overwhelmed by the large number of 199 amendments the Parliament's translation service failed to present translations into all of the EU's eleven official languages, leaving Parliamentarians with nothing more than English, Greek and Danish versions of the 159 page document, which were presented only hours before the discussion was going to take place.

Mrs.

The German Federal Supreme Court ruled on 17 July that deep links from a news search engine to articles on a publishers web site do not violate German copyright or competition law.

The plaintiff, a media group that publishes several newspapers and magazines, including 'Handelsblatt' and 'DM', sued the search engine provider www.paperboy.de for forbearance. After initial success at the trial level ('Landesgericht'), the case was dismissed on appeal ('Berufungsgericht') which in turn was approved by the Federal Supreme Court.

The supreme court stated that deep links do not violate copyright laws because the copyright owner has already made the the articles publicly accessible.

An international coalition of 39 civil liberties groups and consumer rights organisations sent a letter to the European Union on 11 August urging rejection of the proposed intellectual property enforcement directive. The coalition warns that the proposed Directive is over-broad and threatens civil liberties, innovation, and competition policy.