Digital copyright clampdown to jump the Atlantic

While US campaigners are up in arms about the US's notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act, few people realise that even more extreme legislation is coming to the UK via Brussels.

The directive goes by the snappy title of 2001/29/EU, and when it becomes part of UK law next year, it will take away many of the rights UK citizens currently enjoy to use or reproduce copyrighted materials.

It will make it a criminal offence to break or attempt to break the copy protection or access control systems on digital content such as music, videos, eBooks, and software.

If the European directive is applied in European law without modification, it will open the door for similar cases to the Dmitri Sklyarov prosecution in the US, where a programmer is facing a jail sentence for demonstrating a means of circumventing the copy protection on Adobe's eBooks.

Simon Stokes, head of IP and digital media at law firm Tarlo Lyons, said: "Encryption research tends to be quite close to the line of what is legal. But this could well pose a problem for legitimate encryption research."

Other legitimate copying activity, such as teachers copying materials for their students or blind people making Braille copies of their work, could also become illegal.

The directive provides for some exceptions to the Draconian copyright rules, but the legal experts we spoke to felt they were little more than a fig leaf.

Thomas Vinje, European copyright law expert at Morrison and Foerster Brussels, said: "They're just a political compromise to make these issues go away. No one has any idea how to implement them, or whether they will work."

He continued: "I think it is very sad that a piece of legislation that has major public importance was passed without real public debate.

"The legislative progress was dominated by the big rights holders and their well-paid lobbyists, and EU legislators were led around by their noses. I don't think they realised what they were passing."

Stokes at Tarlo Lyons agreed: "The safeguards in this law are vague to the point of obscurity. It's a very one-sided piece of legislation, which goes too far to protect the rights of content providers."

The national governments of the EU have 18 months to incorporate the directive into national law.

A spokesman for the Patent Office, which has responsibility for implementing the directive into UK law, said draft legislation is currently being prepared, which would be put out to consultation in the New Year.