Strange Procedures: Directive on Measures and Procedures to ensure the enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights.
Strange things seem to happen with regard to the Directive on Measures and Procedures to ensure the enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. Although to public databases maintained by the European Parliament stubborly say that the Directive was not on today's agenda for the JURI meeting and will reach the plenum in two days, there are reports e.g. by Paul Meller saying that the European Parliament has postponed a vote on that controversial law on intellectual property enforcement until early March, following drawn out negotiations with the European Commission and member state governments, and FFII indicated that JURI had dealt with that matter just today.
There must be some reason for such undue legislative harum-scarum activism. It looks as if that matter was even dealt with quasi "off-agenda" in JURI.
Paul Meller writes:
[...] The Commission is resisting signing up to an agreement that would stretch the reach of the law to all infringements of intellectual property such as patents, copyright and trademarks, according to people close to the Commission.
In its original proposal, the EU executive body limited the tough criminal sanctions only to infringements made for commercial purposes, tailoring the law to fight counterfeiting and piracy.
When it unveiled its proposal at the beginning of 2003 the record industry and Hollywood movie studios slammed it as insufficient. The record industry in particular wants the law to apply to private infringements, such as those committed by peer-to-peer exchanges of music files.
These rights holders joined forces with others such as software producers, who also lose out from counterfeiting, and they lobbied the European Parliament intensively to get the proposed law toughened up.
Their efforts were rewarded by the Parliament's legal affairs committee, under the supervision of Janelly Fourtou in late 2003, when it adopted amendments to the text that struck out the words "for commercial purposes."
Fourtou, the so-called rapporteur on the dossier, has been criticized for being too close to the music industry. Her husband, Jean-Rene Fourtou is the chief executive of Vivendi Universal SA, the parent company of the world's biggest record company, Universal Music.
[...]
The Irish presidency is expected to support the Parliament's plans to stretch the reach of the law. However, it is unlikely to agree to permit criminal sanctions. Ireland, as well as many other countries in the Union, prefers to leave the choice of sanctions up to member state governments, and wants the reference to criminal punishment scrapped from the text.
'There is a feeling that this isn't the right place to introduce criminal sanctions,' said one EU diplomat, on condition of anonymity.
[...]
Why does the administration of the European Parliament allow that such important changes of the political agenda are not even properly reflected throughout the various public databases which should serve as a means for a proper information of the public?
today's agenda for the 