EU Poised to Attack P2P File-Sharers

Robin Gross of IP Justice writes "The EU is about to vote on a controversial piece of legislation that targets P2P file-sharing and other non-commercial infringements. The EU Intellectual Property Rights Directive creates a 'nuclear weapons' of law enforcement tools for intellectual property holders. It combines the most extreme enforcement provisions found throughout Europe and imposes them collectively onto all of Europe, for example England's Anton Pillar orders that permit recording industry executives to raid and ransack the homes of alleged users of file-sharing software or it's Mareva injunctions that freeze a defendant's bank accounts without a hearing. The vote in the EU plenary will likely be March 11, 2004 - watch the CODE site for developments."

Re:Innocent

[trezor]

• Innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental requirement of justice.

Oh.. In case you missed it, that is totally irellevant. You see, you are facing the recording industry here, not any agancy of legal investigation.

That they now seem to be given even more powers than these agencies, is however quite disturbing.

Now, I'll have to flee Europa as well.

Constitution vs. freedom

[trezor]

Fsck your holy constitution, we used to have freedom in Europa.

Now that golden era seems to be fading.

Strange thing... No really! "Suffering" artists forced to live lifes of "only semi-luxery" *pun intended* seem to take away more freedom and legal protection from people worldwide these days, than anything else. "War on terror" included.

I'm afraid of a corporative appocalyptic future these days...............

Re:Constitution vs. freedom

[ReaperOfSouls]

Even if it was a real war on terror, it still be as doomed as the war on drugs.

Nothing can be that doomed...:-)

Terrorism isn't really something both parties willingly recieve or want; where as in most cases drugs are.

It's kinda like trying to cure the syndromes, and not going for the underlying decease.

Or in the case of drugs, going after something that is not in some cases a desease. Marajana has been proven to have viable and in some cases superior medicinal value then some pharma drugs. The real war on drugs is all about pharma companies making sure their profit margins aren't affected at the cost of sick people. Also its pretty sickening that in the US, more then 50% of imates in our prisons are there on drug convictions, most for mere possesion.

Howcome only i can read it ?

[moro_666]

If any of you "american patriots" would know a thing about
how EU works and even read a few lines from the article
pointed out you would see that it will only be a directive
not a law itself.

In pure English said like that : your country problaly(,
we think and hope,) should make a law that somehow enforces
the idea of the directive.

Don't jump into conclusions too quickly, the EU has far
more important problems with economy and extending itself
than doing anything about the P2P software.

I live in a country that will soon be in EU, and i don't
worry about this directive for 5-6 years i think. At least
so long will it take to make it affect all the countries
in EU.

Besides, most good p2p clients we know are virtually dead
already.

Even if the laws are ever made in the countries there are
going to be clients who encrypt the data being sent to
eachother and are considered as private as e-mailing or
instant messaging, so none has really anything to say
about it.

Nowadays even a msn bot is writeable which would work like
some kind of p2p file sharing program, e.g. the bot reacts
to questions like searchfile:name and sendmefile:name , do
your really think the EU can forbid us the msn
connections ?

dont't think so.

Keep up the hope brothers, P2P will not die.

Re:America the beautiful

[alan_dershowitz]

Many of the founding fathers wished to outlaw slavery, but they knew they'd never get a constitution with that. It'd be kind of like today if you tried to put a "ban abortion" plank in the constitution (please don't draw inferences from this.) If that was tried, it would never happen. They had to sacrifice a limb to save the body, and they did. I give them more credit for that than strict adherence to a futile goal. At the time, everyone was very aware the Constitution had limitations. One of the outcomes of that was the bill of rights.

As for perverting it, I'd say the biggest examples of this are excessive federalization of what clearly are state issues; and judicial fiat, which is probably the biggest threat our constitution has. Other than that, we've been on a steady and fairly unbroken course of realizing the constitution not only as the founding fathers intended, but even further toward its philosophical ideal.

Re:Constitution vs. freedom

[yosemite]

check out this [erols.com]
scrolling down we get this list,

The country-by-country medians for military personnel killed in the war are:

* USSR: 10.0M
* Germany: 3.5M
* China: 2.05M
* Japan: 1.5M
* USA: 0.4M
* Romania: 0.3M
* Yugoslavia: 0.3M
* UK: 0.28M
* Italy: 0.23M
* France: 0.21M
* Hungary: 0.14M
* Poland: 0.125M
* TOTAL: 19.0M

looks like we all owe stalin a big fat thank you.