Jan 29th draft of IP Enforcement directive

Text of the latest (Jan 29th) Council of Ministers draft for the 
Enforcement Directive is now up at:

http://wiki.ael.be/uploads/IPRE-Council-Jan29.html

Unlike the previous Dec 12th draft, which was apparently never treated 
as a serious basis for discussion, the Jan 29th draft is a serious 
attempt by the Irish Presidency to capture mainstream opinion of the 
Parliament, the Commission, and Member States government.

Both the Parliament working group and the Member States working group 
met this week to discuss further drafting issues; but the overall shape 
of the Jan 29th draft should be treated as potentially very close to the 
shape of the final text.

EDRI and FFII will be making a joint presentation on the Directive to 
MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday. Ideally we would like to finalise a 
position by tomorrow (Sunday) night, so that we can try to get a 
bandwagon rolling in the Parliament from Monday onwards.

FIPR and IP-Justice are on the case too, but it would be good to have 
more eyeballs on this.  How much of the powerful criticism of the 
Directive has been taken into account; and how much is still valid, and 
  should be pointed up ?


Resources and Links:

http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/IPRProposalDirectiveInfoPage


Preliminary comparison by Robin Gross of the new Council draft against 
the original Directive text and the text earlier passed by the 
Parliament's JURI committee (nb preliminary version -- an updated 
version will be going up soon on the IP Justice CODE website).

http://www.ffii.org.uk/ip_enforce/IPJ_analysis.pdf
http://www.ffii.org.uk/ip_enforce/IPJ_analysis.html

The HTML file is smaller, but due to a weird bug I'm getting a lot with 
FTP recently, the transfer was truncated, and the last page or so on 
"technical devices" is missing (My fault for still being stuck on 
Windows XP!)



The UK Patent Office has been so busy working for the meetings in 
Brussels on the Directive, it hasn't had time to publish even the raw 
returns from its official public Consultation on the Directive, but some
of them can be pulled off the web, eg with this Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=%22Intellectual+Property%22+%22Enforcement%22++%22Directive%22+consultation+response+&btnG=Google+Search

It would be great if somebody could put together first a list of links 
to the actual responses, and then maybe a brief summary of the positions.


James Heald,
FFII-UK.