EU to make Peer to Peer illegal

EU is set to make Peer to Peer software illegal killing off an entire segment of the software industry. Quite frankly if the wording is as vague as the Wired article suggested then it would also make most operating systems illegal.

"Little-noticed language in a European Union plan to crack down on organized piracy could also make indirect copyright infringement a crime across Europe, with implications similar to the recent MGM v. Grokster U.S. Supreme Court ruling, experts say.

A directive being pushed by the European Commission would, among other things, criminalize 'attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting' acts of copyright infringement. The EU parliament will take up the proposal later this year."

Yes it was the 'aiding' that I was thinking of in relation to Operating Systems as any system that allowed a user to copy a file and then send on the copy could be said to be 'aiding' copyright infringement. The only way around that would be if the machine had some kind of DRM system that checked, for every file that you ever tried to copy, that you had the right to perform that copy, and since 'fair use' is so hard to define alogrythmically it would effectively kill it as well.

The directive actually goes further than the U.S. ruling, in that it makes indirect copyright infringement a crime, while Grokster was a civil case.

The European Commission proposal would also set the maximum criminal penalty for piracy by a "criminal organization" to four years in prison and a 300,000-euro fine. Additionally, it seeks to address disparities in anti-piracy criminal penalties across Europe by obliging different EU member countries to draft uniform maximum prison sentences into their sentencing guidelines.