From: Donald Neil (Professor) MacCormick
Date: 2/10/04 6:51
Subject: Invitation to meeting on IP-enforcement directive

Dear Colleagues,

I invite you to a meeting chaired by myself and Mercedes Echerer MEP concerning the IP Enforcement Directive.

The report by Mrs Fourtou is on the agenda for the mini-session of 25-26 February.

The IP Enforcement directive is very important, to give businesses a familiar single legal landscape for IPR enforcement issues right across Europe; and to stamp down hard on organised criminal counterfeiting and piracy.

But legitimate companies of all sizes are concerned about the potential dangers of an enormous increase in the applicability of the "nuclear weapons" of IP enforcement law, to civil (ie non-criminal) legal disputes of all scales, and to states where they are no part of the legal tradition.

These include measures such as Anton Piller orders (raids for evidence without notice/notification) ; Mareva injunctions (freezing of assets, even before a case has been discussed in Court) ; new powers to demand the disclosure of personal information ; and the admissibility of anonymous denounciations as court evidence.

This is a very sensitive issue. The directive represents a once-in-a-generation change to the legal landscape that companies have to deal with on Intellectual Property Rights - copyrights, trademarks, patents, confidential information etc etc. Hardly a single company of any size will not be affected in some way.

The meeting will take place with legal experts including Dr Rainer Bakels, Professor of Law at the University of Amsterdam, and representatives of different associations including EGA (European Generics Associaion), the FFII (software patents), EDRI (digital rights), FIPR (Foundation for Information Policy Research) and Librarians' organisations in order to think about and discuss an appropriate collective strategy about this dossier.

A working group of the Council of Ministers is still discussing the text, and has already largely rewritten the text of JURI committee. Note that Trialogues are going on and substantial changes are still being proposed.

The latest draft of the Council text is available on this website : http://wiki.ael.be/uploads/IPRE-Council-Feb06.html
It includes changes of the most fundamental kind to the whole scope of the directive, including:

* the classes of intellectual property rights to be covered by the directive (substantially widened),
* provisions for criminal sanctions, which JURI called for (removed)
* the severity of infringements the directive should apply to (still the subject of active debate)

as well as a raft of very important smaller technical changes -- hardly a single article is unchanged.

The meeting will take tomorrow place from 3.00 to 5.00 in room S 2.3 without interpretation.

Looking forward to meeting you tomorrow.

Best regards,

Neil MacCormick MEP