9 March, 2004
Report From Laurence Vandewalle of EU Green Party:

Dear all,

The Fourtou report on intellectual property passed today as the rapporteur wished. This means that the package proposed by Mrs Fourtou (and supported by her own group, the PSE, the ELDR and the UEN) after unofficial meetings with the Council working group and the Commission was adopted in it's entirety.

All other amendments - those from V/ALE, Marco Cappato/others/GUE and EDD - were defeated. The majority in all the roll call votes was of the order 300-350 with Fourtou, 100-200 against.

This result means:

- patents are included within the scope of the directive. This is of serious concern to a number of sectors including software developers and the free software movement, generic pharmaceutical companies, the automobile spare parts industry, farmers at threat from GM contamination etc.

- only 3 parts of the directive are limited to "commercial scale".
This means that the provisions of Articles 7(1), 8 and 9 can potentially be used against consumers. In the US this kind of legislation has been used to target, amongst others, children and their parents for downloading music.

- there are concerns amongst ISPs that they can be attacked for "providing" the means to download content which is protected by copyright.

During the voting session, Neil MacCormick raised the issue of family connections in relation to conflicts of interest. This is in the light of numerous recent articles highlighting Mrs Fourtou's husband being CEO of Vivendi Universal. Pat Cox indicated that this would be raised in the Parliament Bureau.

The results of roll call votes have not yet been published; however, it is clear that most PSE delegations voted in such a way as to defeat amendments on the scope and to support the final package. Further details of voting patterns will be circulated later today.