"[...] Vicki Salmon, spokesperson for the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, feels that European proposals to make wilful patent infringement a criminal act, like trade mark counterfeiting and copyright piracy, show a lack of understanding of the issue and thus would be a retrograde step.
It is the view of Vicki and her colleagues in the Institute that, in an age when Governments are trying to foster competition and technical development, making patent infringement a criminal activity is likely to inhibit these desirable objectives. She said:
'In order for a patent to be valid, the invention which is the subject of any patent application must not have been disclosed in any form at all, anywhere in the world at any time before the date the application was filed. There is not a patent office in the world that can search everything that has ever been published. So there obviously can never be an absolute guarantee that any patent is valid.
It is thus not unknown for organisations, which have information that in their view clearly invalidates a patent to proceed to manufacture products or carry out processes, which would be construed as infringements if the patents were valid. Should the issue reach the courts the alleged infringer will produce the information they have in order to invalidate the patent. If they fail to satisfy the courts they will pay damages.
This is an entirely different state of affairs from the wilful selling of goods or services under a well-known trade mark which clearly belongs to someone else and has thus been counterfeited in order to mislead the public into thinking they are getting the real thing. This is often coupled with other criminal activity (e.g. money laundering or tax avoidance). It is the same with copyright material. Copying someone else?'s films or records and then selling them as the genuine article is really little more than theft.' [...]"
Some more detailed comment of CIPA can be found here:
"[...] However, in providing the background for a case for criminal sanctions for all intentional intellectual property rights infringements, the draft makes several serious errors.
1. The Directive appears to equate all intentional intellectual property infringement to 'piracy and counterfeiting'. It advances a number of harms caused by counterfeiting and piracy ('are a serious threat to national economies and governments') which are at the very extreme even in relation to counterfeiting and piracy; however to attribute such harm to 'intellectual property infringements in general' presents a highly unbalanced picture.
2. Secondly the major part of the preamble to the Directive appears not to seek to justify the application of criminal sanctions otherwise than to counterfeiting and piracy. References to counterfeiting and piracy are used in many places to justify the application of criminal sanctions - 'make it difficult to combat counterfeiting and piracy effectively'; 'counterfeiting and piracy also present problems for consumer protection'; 'this phenomenon [distribution of pirated goods] appears to be increasingly linked to organised crime'; 'Counterfeiting and pirating have become lucrative activities [like]... drug trafficking'; 'additional provisions to strengthen and improve the fight against counterfeiting and piracy are therefore necessary'. However, counterfeiting and piracy are not the same as infringement of intellectual property rights, even if intentional. Not all (by any means) infringements of intellectual property rights, even if 'intentional' can be characterised as counterfeiting or piracy, nor do they have the same effects. The Directive itself makes it clear that the justification for criminal sanctions is in relation to counterfeiting and piracy. The substance of the Directive should also be restricted (at most) to such activities.
3. The preamble to the Directive (and the Directive itself) fail completely to recognise the possibility that (a) there are legitimate competitors to intellectual property rights owners; and (b) that such competitors have rights, as do intellectual property rights owners. Repeated reference is made to the Charter of Fundamental Rights that 'Intellectual property shall be protected'. The Directive should recognise that competitors have rights also, and that criminalisation of intellectual property infringement could have a serious impact on those rights, for reasons which are discussed below. [...]"
I think that CIPA is absolutely right with this statement. It would mean to do to the supporters of the present role of Intellectual Property in our economy a disservice when overshooting the mark by introducing excessive and poorly conceived enforcement measures on the field of patent law. Similar overshootings, not directly caused by the EU Commission but promoted by certain groups from the private sector, can also be observed elsewhere in the field of copyrights. Grassroots groups disliking the general concept of Intellectual Property will accept and be grateful for such points of attack.
statement of the British 
recent plans of the EU Commission to harmonise criminal sanctions, inter alia, on acts of patent infringement by means of