p2p news / p2pnet: Europe’s BEUC campaign to guarantee basic customer rights in the digital 21st century is picking up momentum.

"Four years after the passage of the European Union’s Copyright Directive, member nations are still grappling with how to provide protection for digital rights management and other content-protection technologies while allowing consumers to enjoy a practice many have come to regard as normal and legal," says the International Herald Tribune.

"The directive unambiguously gives legal protection to technologies that prevent copyright infringement. Yet it also provides for certain exemptions, including an exception for consumers to make so-called private copies.

"But even in countries whose laws explicitly allow some private copying, copy-protection technology ends up preventing the consumer from benefiting in practice. In fact, the Copyright Directive makes circumvention of these technologies a crime."

Music from corporate download services is "like a box of chocolates," said the BEUC (Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs ) , announcing its campaign. "You never know what you’re gonna get. Consumers purchasing music downloads from major online suppliers are trapped…"

The organization wants six fundamental rights entrenched:

• Right to choice, knowledge and cultural diversity
• Right to the principle of ‘technical neutrality’ – defend and maintain consumer rights in the digital environment
• Right to benefit from technological innovations without abusive restrictions
• Right to interoperability of content and devices
• Right to the protection of privacy
• Right not to be criminalised
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Urging policy makers to endorse the six Consumers Digital Rights, the BEUC also demands:

• A legal framework that will encourage new means of exposure and distribution of digital content, while guaranteeing remuneration to artists, creators and performers and providing consumers and the public with new means of access, discovery and new uses;
• A new balance between exclusive rights in the exploitation of digital content and public interest objectives in using and sharing such content, taking into account the new possibilities of content usage enabled by technical progress;
• That industry desist from legal action against P2P downloaders to allow the market to find solutions for the on-line development of audio/visual distribution that takes due account of the public interest and the interest of artists, creators and performers;
• Action to find solutions on how consumers can effectively exercise their private use rights and to guarantee that users of DRMs respect the legitimate interest of consumers in their personal autonomy and private sphere;
• Mechanisms to ensure that TPMs or DRMs, which restrict uses legally exempted from copyright or not falling under copyright, do not benefit from legal protection;
• A review of the EU legal framework on consumer protection and intellectual property in view of the 6 consumers rights demands expressed in this Declaration.

A 2004 Berkman Center for Information and Society at Harvard University study found that since the implementation of the Copyright Directive in Europe, "the trend has been toward a more restrictive interpretation of ‘private use’ by national legislatures," says the International Herald Tribune, going on:

"Of the 15 member states at the time, the report said, only Italy had incorporated the Copyright Directive’s voluntary ‘private use’ exception into law. The law grants consumers the right to make one copy of protected content for personal use as long as this does not interfere with the content itself.

"British copyright law, by contrast, is among the most restrictive and provides for exceptions only in the case of "time-shifting," or recording a broadcast to watch it later, the study said."

Malta, Lithuania, Slovenia and Luxembourg have all incorporated the private-copy exception into their laws but. "Courts in Germany, Belgium and France have taken restrictive approaches," the story has Urs Gasser, one of the authors of the Berkman study, saying, "but this issue is still very much in flux," as the French case demonstrates."

Gasser is referring to the Universal case, continues the International Herald Tribune. Under it, "the Paris appeals court said that if a DVD was not copyable, there must be a clear and visible warning. The small ‘CP’ symbol does not meet that description, the court said in reversing the lower court. The appeals court also decided that ‘one of the essential characteristics’ of a DVD is that it can be copied.

"Hoping to capitalize on the decision, a group of lawyers in Paris filed suit in May against five major film companies, including Universal Pictures, over their copy-protection technology.

"A possible solution that does not rely on the national courts has been proposed in France as part of a bill implementing the Copyright Directive to be voted on in December. The French government would create an independent body whose purpose would be to arbitrate matters relating to private copying and technological copy protection."

French data protection authority the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) recently rejected an Organized Music demand that, had it been granted, would have given OM members Vivendi Universal (France), EMI Group (UK), Warner Music (US) and Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) permission to spy on p2p users.

See:-
BEUC campaign – Big Music ignores your rights, November 10, 2005
International Herald Tribune – Consumers fight copy protection, November 11, 205
recently rejected – Big Four p2p ’spy’ demand fails, November 10, 2005
Sony BMG – Sony DRM goes on MS spyware list, November 13, 2005

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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