EU copyright a case of 'eurogarbage'

Net Results: The European Commission and the European Parliament do not exactly inspire confidence when it comes to the way they vote and legislate around digital rights issues.

Not only do they often not seem to understand such issues or the large consumer, privacy, innovation and competitive stakes involved, but they also take bizarrely contradictory stances on them, leaving an onlooker to wonder if there's ever to be any hope of clear thinking or consistency.

Take this week's deliberations by the EU on what, if any, steps to take against Microsoft.

Barring last minute settlements - which at present seem unlikely - EU regulators will most likely declare the company a monopolist and then require it to break apart its software and release some of its Windows code to European developers.

As the New York Times points out, the Commission has generally taken a tougher line than the US on competition issues, denying General Electric permission to acquire Honeywell a few years ago.

If the Commission decides to punish Microsoft, it would likely require the company to offer a version of its software that does not have its RealPlayer media player, used to play music and DVDs, bundled with the operating system.

The regulators also are expected to require Microsoft to release enough of its Windows code to allow third party developers to create server software that will run as comfortably on Windows as Microsoft's own server software.

All of this is pretty tough stuff, and one can be certain that the software giant's lawyers are working hard to broker some kind of settlement more to the company's liking than these punishments.

Those who felt the current US administration in Washington is too corporate-friendly would applaud such actions by the EU, of course.

The EU clearly has more spine than the US when it comes to standing up to big corporate interests, such people might believe.

What, then, does one make of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, passed last week?

According to Ross Anderson, Cambridge engineering professor and chairman of the UK-based digital rights lobby, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), the Directive inhibits innovation, and gives sweeping powers to corporates to punish those found in violation of their copyright.

There is little distinction made between those engaged in large scale, deliberate piracy and a 15-year-old downloading music files; between operations knowingly infringing copyright and those who unwittingly or naively do so.

Companies or individuals found in breach of proper copyright use could have their assets seized, their bank accounts frozen, and homes and businesses searched - an extraordinarily heavy-handed approach to enforcing IP rights that have been bloated by the power of big corporate and entertainment conglomerate lobbying.

Big business has succeeded in moving the concept of IP and copyright protection far beyond the intention of founding IP legislation in the US and Europe - which was to protect creative work for a period, but then release it after a reasonable period of time to be built upon by others.

"Unfortunately, Hollywood lobbyists got there first and captured the high ground," Mr Anderson told me on a visit recently to Dublin to speak at a conference.

The result now is European copyright and intellectual property(IP) legislation that he calls "Eurogarbage".

It could have been even worse - originally the Directive included provisions for criminal sanctions against those found in violation of IP law, putting teenagers involved in peer to peer file sharing on the same evilness level as those breaking and entering homes, mugging elderly people or hijacking cars. FIPR lobbied hard to successfully get some changes in the Directive at Committee level, though it failed to have amendments added at the tail end of deliberations. We can at least be grateful for those alterations.

The good news is that there's now a permanent digital rights watchdog office in the EU, called EDRi (European Digital Rights - I'm not sure what the 'i' is for, and their website, www.edri.org, doesn't say).

It has been funded for the first six months by FIPR - which battled valiantly against the more draconian provisions of the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers ACT (RIP), and actually got a national dialogue going on the subject - and for the rest of the year by, interestingly, George Soros.

Fourteen privacy and civil rights groups from 11 European countries have membership so far. It sure would be great to see an Irish group eventually among that membership.

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