TheRegister has an intresting article for our European visitors and CloneCD users. The article speaks about upcoming European legislation that will not allow circumvention of copy protections and will probably also make CloneCD an illegal piece of software in the countries that are member of the European Union.
The new European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) would however not criminalise anyone who circumvents a copyprotection, any one circumventing a protection would face civil and not criminal court actions in Europe. An organistation called Campaign for Digital Rights (CDR) is keeping an eye on it:
There are two threads to the directive (A6.1 and A6.2), dealing with banning circumvention and the devices which assist it, he explained. |
UK laws already ban devices, but there have very few uses of this law.
"It's unlikely that the UK will criminalise circumvention; that'll just be actionable in the civil courts," Keegan.
However "other European nations may be softer or harder on the laws and implementation", he added.
This is ironic since one of the aims of the EUCD is to standardise laws across Europe, but in practice, the directive may lead to greater diversity.
So far the EUCD has received little attention but the CDR aims to mobilise opposition against the directive, which the Recording and Publishing Industries are heavily lobbying. The CDR is also protesting against music industry plans to market copy-protected CDs.
It seems that Europe will not have it's own DCMA, but a weakered version of it. This is however enough to stop (fear) developers from making software to circumvent copy protections.
It seems that one company however saw this coming: Elaborate Bytes. Who moves to Switserland that is not a member of the European Union.
Read the entire article on TheRegister here.
Source: Theregister.co.uk
