Remember my previous post "Entertainment IPREDators" about IPRED2, the controversial directive that the European Parliament seemed on the verge of approving? If you don’t, you should go read it again to freshen up your memory, because the directive has been approved two days ago with 374 votes for to 278 against. True, it has been amended in part, but its most crucial aspects remain undamaged.
Its purported purpose is to “harmonize” the copyright laws of the European countries. Unfortunately, it’s quite confused and vague and touches copyright together with trademarks and counterfeiting, as has also been expressed by Giuseppe Corasaniti, an Italian magistrate who was awarded many times for his expertise and activity in matters of multimedia and international copyright laws. In short, the directive seems to go against international treaties and conventions previously signed by the European Union (which still remain binding); it introduces the risk of confusing counterfeiting with copyright abuse; it does not specify if and how members of the Union should cooperate (for example to control imports), nor if and how police forces of each member country should create specialized teams to deal with the kind of crimes the directive itself tries to contrast; finally, no economic or social analysis was made on the target phenomena prior to the drafting of the directive.
One of the most criticized points in the directive is how it allows private companies that feel they have been wronged to closely cooperate with investigations and access personal data of private citizens, without the need for a formal accusation, while being notified immediately by law enforcers about details of investigations when they are started. The directive does specify that each member country must guarantee that the privacy of its citizens is respected and not stepped on (as if it were necessary to specify such a thing), but leaves the details related to how to do it to each country (and let me have some doubts on the effectiveness of some privacy preservation policies in the absence of clear, unified guidelines).
At the same time, IPRED2 also introduces the notion of fair use, which as far as I know was until now mostly absent in Europe, by including personal entertainment or educational uses into a category of non-punishable behaviors. Excluded from the directive is thus punishment for end-users, while websites like YouTube/Google Video or peer-to-peer file-sharing services and their developers are criminalized. It’s worth noting, though, that end-users who abuse copyright according to the current laws are still considered criminals punishable with jail time in several member countries, and the directive doesn’t appear to change that; the set of countries where this applies includes Italy, where the introduction of much harsher punishments since 2000 did not significantly lower the market for counterfeit products nor copyright abuse.
So if this directive is so vague and confused, yet restrictive, if it doesn’t specify what really must be done and how, leaving very important details to the interpretation and action of each member of the European Union, yet gives private companies more rights and power — who is it supposed to benefit? Can a halfway-done “harmonization” really be called a “harmonization”? And why aren’t the local media (say, in Italy for example) giving the news any relevance, when it clearly concerns the rights and responsibilities of the people, it touches a tremendously delicate subject and areas of specialized knowledge, yet it is voted by politicians with mostly little or no technical competence in the matter? I’m leaving the conclusions to you, dear readers. Keep in mind, though, that while the “traditional media” are so engulfed in commenting on every detail of sport events or the latest reality shows, the emperor has less and less clothes.
Sometimes, after seeing some of the people who participate to reality shows on television, “stranded” on a sunny and “deserted” island, or hard at work on the task to lie down on a puffy couch in an “isolated” house, I’ve been known to remark with “they should have them work in a coal mine instead, that would be a lot closer to reality”. Someone must have heard me, because there’s now a new reality show in town called “The Coal House” (on BBC), which has a family live in the conditions people lived in 1927, with the male components of said family working daily at a coal mine. No fancy meals, no showers, nothing more than mud, a handful of pigs and hens, and whatever they can bring home with their own hard work. Strict? Maybe, but surely closer to real life (for a television show, at least) than a set of scripted contests to become the next big top model or this or that celebrity-in-disgrace’s next fake but heavily marketed companion. Cheers.
