Europe Calls For Tougher IP Laws

The European Commission has joined the fraught debate surrounding the protection of intellectual property, after it admitted that its own current IP rights laws are not strong enough.

The admission came in a report it has just published that examined the effectiveness of its own 2004 ‘Directive on Intellectual Property Rights’ and also looked at the extent of today’s online piracy activity.

It seems the European Commission is worried about the alarming volume and financial implications of intellectual property rights infringements.

“A first evaluation of the impact of the Directive shows that noteworthy progress has been made since it was adopted and implemented in the Member States,” the report stated. “The Directive created high European legal standards to enforce different types of rights that are protected by independent legal regimes (such as copyright, patents, trademarks and designs, but also geographical indications and plant breeders’ rights).”

Caught Out By Internet

“However, despite an overall improvement of enforcement procedures, the sheer volume and financial value of intellectual property rights infringements is alarming,” it said. “One reason is the unprecedented increase in opportunities to infringe intellectual property rights offered by the Internet. The Directive was not designed with this challenge in mind.”

The report said that multi-purpose nature of the Internet has made it easy for criminals to commit a wide variety of infringements of intellectual property rights, and the report warned that goods infringing intellectual property rights are offered for sale on the Internet.

There is little doubt that the scale of the issue is huge. In Microsoft’s Attitudes to Piracy last April for example, one in three British adults thought that using pirated software was “acceptable”. Indeed, 1,000 people took part in the survey, which discovered that one in eight had admitted to using pirated software at work. And more than half believed their employer would consider the practice acceptable.

File-Sharing

Meanwhile, the EC report also warned that search engines are making it easy for fraudsters to attract potential customers for these goods. And it offered a bleak assessment of file-sharing.

“File-sharing of copyright-protected content has become ubiquitous, partly because the development of legal offers of digital content has not been able to keep up with demand, especially on a cross-border basis, and has led many law-abiding citizens to commit massive infringements of copyright and related rights in the form of illegal up-loading and disseminating protected content.”

“Many online sites are either hosting or facilitating the online distribution of protected works without the consent of the right holders. In this context, the limitations of the existing legal framework may need to be clearly assessed,” the report said.

Economic/Physical Harm

The EC concluded that it was clear about the economic harm, and potentially physical harm, all this copyright theft was doing.

“Infringements of intellectual property rights cause widespread economic harm,” the report concluded. “A significant number of products infringing intellectual property rights now pose a real threat to consumer health and safety.”

It said that proper protection of IP rights is fundamental to stimulate innovation and culture in a competitive, wealth-generating, knowledge-based economy.

One of the long time proponents of IP protection in the UK, the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) agreed that the EC laws need to adjust to new technologies such as the Internet.

“It is absolutely paramount to the future of innovation and creativity that the law keeps pace with technological developments,” said Julian Heathcote-Hobbins, General Counsel at FAST. “The creative industry was one of the few growth areas during the last recession, and it continues to be vital for wealth generation. Online piracy must be taken seriously and dealt with if we are to protect and nurture creatives and entrepreneurs.”

“It is clear that people are not aware of the knock-on effects that online piracy can have on creators.” he added. “The Internet has evidently increased opportunities all round, but it is also a vehicle to infringe intellectual property rights on multiple levels. It is a factor that needs to be continually reviewed closely.”

In the UK, the Digital Economy Act was introduced last year to try and combat file-sharing and copyright theft. But it has proved to be hugely controversial and is currently facing scrutiny over whether it is legal and justifiable, after BT and TalkTalk were granted a Judicial Review of the law in November.