Patents out, business conflicts still criminalised - IPRED2

Brussels, 28 November 2006 -- In today's vote on the "IPR Enforcement
Directive" (IPRED2, 2005/0127 (COD)), the European Parliament's Industry
Committee (ITRE) limited the directive's scope to copyright piracy and
trademark counterfeiting. The rapporteur, David Hammerstein MEP
(Greens/EFA), received backing from all groups for his amendments.

The FFII welcomes the reduced scope and other improvements, but notes
that business conflicts are still criminalised in some cases. These
issues would have been addressed by rejected amendments from MEPs
Dorette Corbey (PSE), Umberto Guidoni (GUE/NGL), Edith Mastenbroek (PSE)
and Patrizia Toia (ALDE).

Other significant amendments however mean that:

* The state cannot unilaterally start an infringement investigation. The
police cannot know about private licensing arrangements and even if
licenses are public, government bodies are sometimes confused by
unfamiliar concepts. In February 2006, a UK Trading Standards officer
wanted to prosecute a business for selling CDs of the free Firefox
browser. Further, rights holders may choose to not enforce their own
rights.

* Rights holders may not participate in criminal investigations. The Max
Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law
noted that this provision was fundamentally incompatible with a
democratic society.

The amended directive still allows some regular business conflicts to
fall under criminal law. The directive defines "counterfeiting" to
include regular trademark/tradename conflicts between companies.
Copyright piracy remains undefined. The current text therefore still
does not comply with established fundamental principles of criminal law,
which requires precise and explicit descriptions for all individual
criminal offenses.

FFII analysts also note that this is the first directive that gives the
European Community power to define criminal law which is unrelated to
trade barriers in the Internal Market. FFII president Pieter Hintjens
says "There has been very little support for this directive except from
the Commission, and we believe its real goal is to set a precedent
rather than catching pirates."

more at press.ffii.org

CPU patent threat

How some people doesn't seem to see the current patent system as a threat to a healthy society and business methods is really impossible for me to believe. Check american newspapers, almost everyday you can see a patent claim sueing over really ridiculous technologies which one will find normal to use. Another case which caim to my audience this week is Intel claiming patents around making CPUs. Isn't it a good example as patent can be abused to destroy competition and overthrow the market? It isn't only in information technologies (such as software patents), but also in medical and drug research, even diseases. Can we patent a disease and make somebody pay for getting it?
With IPRED intel can not only sue competition, they can freeze their bank accounts or even shutdown a whole branch. Isn't it obvious what is going on?


- source Inquirer-

Photo story from ITAPA - eGovernment

Short photo story from the ITAPA 2006 - eGovernment conference which has been held in Bratislava. Itapa is international conference focusing at eGovernment. These photos were taken in three corners of the ITAPA (Interoperability panel, FLOSS terminal corner and Open Technology stand supported by SKOSI, ngo and Sun Microsystems Slovakia).
gallery