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The Second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) is now going through the Justice and Home Affairs route. On 4 June, it passed it's first port of call at the Council's Working Group on Substantive Criminal Law (DROIPEN) - the first step on the road to the decision of EU's Council of Ministers.

DROIPEN's job is to prepare the Council's first reading on the directive. The national government representatives might come up with a proposal that all Member States agree on, or else they will identify issues that the Ministers of Justice will have to vote on.

According to information kindly shared by some Member States representatives following DROIPEN's work, the state of play in general

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A popular subtitle exchange community in Poland, Napisy.org, was in shock, after nine of its members were accused of posting illegal translations of movies and were held by the Police for questioning.

The Napisy.org community, that gathers approx. 600 000 users, allowed the submission of translated subtitles for movies (especially from English into Polish) for free. The translators did not get any money for their work.

The Polish Police had a common intervention in 6 cities of Silesia, Podlachia, Cracow and Szczecin where they entered at 6 AM in some of the translator's homes and took them for questioning. According to the Polish Police, 2000 CDs with allegedly illegal copied movies were also found

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Financial Times obtained an executive summary of a new report produced by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that estimates the trade losses due to piracy and counterfeiting did not exceed 200 billion USD.

The report should be endorsed by the OECD board this month and is considered politically sensitive, taking into account that the estimates from the industry show figures up to 3-4 times higher than the OECD estimates based on reported customs seizures in various countries.

The efforts of the international business lobbists, that have pushed for Germany to put the fight against counterfeiting on the next G8 summit agenda, could be undermined by this new report. This is why the

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Bulgarian authorities went beyond the EU limits in investigating Internet users and website owners in 2005 according to MEP Antonyia Parvanova who thinks the Bulgarian officials have caused the bankruptcy of some Internet clubs and brought serious damages to a website owner by prosecuting people who had not actually committed any crime.

She believes that these cases should be investigated and she stated she would address this matter to the European Commission to verify whether the actions of the Bulgarian authorities did not infringe the European laws, especially article 11 of the Chapter of Human Rights.

Rumen Petkov, Bulgaria's Minister of Interior, stated the actions involving

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Rapidshare AG sued the German society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights (GEMA) in order to clarify the legal situation regarding free file hosting in Germany.

The counter-attack from Rapidshare, a well-known free file hosting provider based in Switzerland, comes after the suit initiated in Germany by GEMA in January 2007 for distributing MP3 files on Rapidshare.com. GEMA won a preliminary injunction in the first lawsuit that was upheld by the appeal in March of the District Court of Cologne.

The District Court in Cologne had considered that Rapidshare was liable for copyright infringements even if the works were uploaded by the users and not by the provider.

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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

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A new communication was published on 3 April 2007 by the European Commission (EC) on enhancing the patent system in Europe, suggesting new ways of creating a Community patent.

The communication supports a compromise between the European Patent Litigation Agreement supported by the European Patent Office and the Commission's Community Patent, with its own courts system. The new integrated EU-wide jurisdictional system for patents combing the two elements is aimed to revitalise the debate on a patent system in Europe, in a way which encourages Member States to work towards consensus and real progress on this issue.

"Recent discussions with Member States show polarised positions on patent

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The European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee has adopted on 20 March 2007 the draft IPRED directive following the opinions presented by MEP Nicola Zingaretti, with some important amendments though.

The good news is that the very controversial definition of "commercial scale infringement", that previously included the IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) infringements by private users for personal use, was detailed and now the text refers to a criminal infringement as "a deliberate and conscious infringement of the intellectual property right for the purpose of obtaining commercial advantage."

The patents and utility models have been excluded from the scope of the directive. From the unexamined IPRs, design rights, database rights, and