[Fsfe-uk] Deadline Sept 26th, IPRED2 consultation in the UK (harsh "IP" enforcement)

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

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