Monday, October 20, 2003

The New York Times is reporting on the EU's plans for an intellectual property enforcement directive. And if you thought the EUCD and the DMCA were bad, you should see this.

"Lawyers who have studied a draft of the proposed law say that not only could a teenager who downloaded a music file be sent
to jail under it; so too could managers of the Internet service provider that the teenager happened to use, whether they knew
what the teenager was doing or not."

I had not previously appreciated that the lady in charge of shepherding the directive through, Janelly Fourtou, a French member of the European Parliament, is married to the chief executive of Vivendi Universal, Jean-René Fourtou. She doesn't believe she faces a conflict of interest.

FIPR and Ross Anderson in particular have been warning us about this for months.

And world renowned intellectual property specialists such as Bill Cornish, Josef Drexel, Rito Hilty, Annette Kur and others have just published a article seriously criticising the proposals.

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