Today (Apr 25, 2007), the European Parliament has signed off the IPRED2 directive relatively unchanged, despite the heavy resistance from Open Standards lobbyists.
IPRED2 is the second part of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive. It proposes criminal sanctions for infringements on intellectual property rights, such as copyright, patent law or trademark law. However, these specific infringements aren't defined very clearly, so this law actually creates a great legal incertainty about what kinds of infringements are actually criminal.
Following the introduction of this directive in a couple of years, a great period of legal incertainty is bound to follow. IPRED2 will support greatly the current strategies of big mega corporations to dry out innovation by suing the small companies out of business. Also, it is highly probable that this directive is going to harm free and open source software, because there is an ongoing attempt to try and flood the market with trivial patents that apply to Open Source software, so that it practically has to be licensed to litterally thousands of companies who hold patents on such simple elements as click buttons.
The problem is that IPRED2 is going to be handled in criminal law, not civil law. This means that, for example, an invalid patent is going to be examined in a «shoot first» manner, where the CEO of a small company goes to jail first for infringing on a patent, and then has to challenge the patent from jail in order to rehabilitate. This is because patents are supposedly not handled by criminal law, even though they are effectively creating criminal law.
Also, this has weird implications since the European Patent Office is now capable of creating criminal law by granting patents. On the other hand though, every government official is supposed to be capable of telling you whether or not you are a criminal. If you now go to your favorite government official and ask him whether you are a criminal, he can't give you a definitive answer without going through millions of patents and reading through millions of books, assessing whether or not you are actually infringing on intellectual property rights.
Since this is impracticable, IPRED2 clearly puts one of the major properties of a constitutional state out of order, which is legal certainty...
More information can be found on http://www.ipred.org/. FFII press release is on http://press.ffii.org/Press[...]%2C_Innovators