The UK patent office is holding a consultation about IPRED2. Submissions have to be made before Monday the 26th of September.
IPRED2 is the new Directive which requires EU member states to criminalise commercial-scale, intentional infringement of copyright, patent, or trademarks (among other things). It also requires that aiding or abetting be criminalised, and lists harsh punishments which must be available such as jail time, large fines, seizing of assets, closure of business, and others. Writing filesharing software could be claimed to be abetting copyright infringement. Using a free software DVD player would be copyright infringement (ever since the European Copyright Directive turned copyright law into a general technology control law). Infringing a software patent... that's probably not infringement, but how many people and companies will bet jail time that software patents are invalid? All those acts are intentional, and they're commercial scale if that is defined as "you might have damaged my profits" - and that seems to be the way it will be interpreted. I've collected info about this directive and the harm it could do here: http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ipred2/ipred2.en.html Here's the UK patent office's page about it's consultation: http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/enforcement.htm (Thanks to Gavin Hill for informing me of this consultation) The consultation lists the parts of the directive that the UKPTO is particularly interested in hearing comments on. Strangely, it doesn't see Article 3 of the Directive being particularly interesting. Article 3 is the bit that says that every member state must make everything about infringing IP a crime. The text of Article 3 is quoated here: http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ipred2/ipred2.en.html#summary Can someone make a comment on this proposal to the UK patent office? Individual submissions as well as an AFFS submission would be ideal. I can probably answer most questions people have, and info can be copied from the above FSFE page (since FSFE isn't sending the UK patent office it's comments). Remember to state how your concerns are about "commercial-scale" and "intentional" actions. And remember that this is a Directive plus a Council Framework Decision (as explained on the FSFE page). There's a newly set up mailing list for general discussion on this at: https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/ipred2 but I guess specific UK or AFFS actions should be coordinated on this list. -- Ciarán O'Riordan, ___________________/ Join the Fellowship of FSFE to http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/ _/ support the campaigns against software ___________________________________/ patents and IPRED2 http://fsfe.org _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
