In a move designed to ensure "donations" from the Cartel ( recording industry), two ailing politicians have declared their "views" on how to treat personal copyright nfringement which in many countries is actually legal.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-223.htmlThe German IT news website heise.de is reporting today that two powerful members of the EU parliament want to broaden criminal enforcement rules against copyright infringement. Janelly Fourtou, who is married to the former Vivendi CEO Jean-René Fourtou, and her colleague Nicole Fontaine want file sharers to be treated the same way as commercial infringers.
Fontaine and Fourtou introduced several amendments to the second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive that is currently being debated by a committee of the European parliament. Some of them just consist of striking the words "on a commercial scale" out of the original proposal, thus making every act of copyright infringement a criminal offense.
Others target specific types of copyright infringement. One example: Tourists that bring home counterfeit DVDs from their vacation could be treated the same way as the producers of these products. From the amendments:
"For the purposes of this Directive, 'counterfeiting' includes: (a) holding with no legitimate reason, importing under any customs arrangements or exporting goods presented under a counterfeit trade mark;"
Fourtou and Fontaine also want to increase minimum penalties for copyright infringements to fines of at least 600.000 Euro for serious cases, with the ability to go to ten times the profit made by the counterfeiter.
As stated before poor law is unenforcable and equating home users grabbing a few mp3,s to dvd pirates making millions is the mindset of the moronic.
What this amendment really seeks to do is transfer to public bodies the massive cost of taking users to court to try to prove infringement, so in effect they are trying to pass on the recording industries cost to the police force, something
you will be asked to pick up the tab on, nice trick this one, its actually been tried in Germany where the police are now crying foul themselves over the spiralling cost involved, lets stand firm in asking those who make multiple billions from monopolising the music industry to to pick up their own costs when launching frivolous infringement cases and not us.
