EDRI-gram latest

The latest EDRI-gram has been published. As usual I recommend reading it in full. A couple of highlights:

IPRED2 adopted by the EP Legal Affairs committee

"The European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee has adopted on 20 March 2007 the draft IPRED directive following the opinions presented by MEP Nicola Zingaretti, with some important amendments though.

The good news is that the very controversial definition of "commercial scale infringement", that previously included the IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) infringements by private users for personal use, was detailed and now the text refers to a criminal infringement as "a deliberate and conscious infringement of the intellectual property right for the purpose of obtaining commercial advantage."

The patents and utility models have been excluded from the scope of the directive. From the unexamined IPRs, design rights, database rights, and possibly rights related to semiconductor topographies are still in.

The bad news is that definitions are kept vague, the Committee considering that the European Court of Justice should interpret them. "

And

General ideas behind a computer game are not copyrighted

"The UK Court of Appeal has ruled that general ideas in a computer game can be copied, in the appeal Nova Productions, producer of Pocket Money computer game, made against two rival companies, Mazooma Games and Bell Fruit Games."

Judge Jacobs who gave the ruling said: "If protection for such general ideas as are relied on here were conferred by the law, copyright would become an instrument of oppression rather than the incentive for creation which it is intended to be. Protection would have moved to cover works merely inspired by others, to ideas themselves."