Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

European Parliament endorses anti-piracy initiative

22 May 2000, 12:00 am

By a vote of 504 to 0, the European Parliament has adopted a report calling for immediate measures to combat the widespread theft of creative works within the EU. The action is expected to generate a series of EU anti-piracy initiatives in the upcoming months.

“The Parliament’s dramatic and overwhelming vote is a major victory for Europe,” said Isabelle Roudard, Director General of the Interactive Software Federation of Europe, a member of the coalition of creative industries that supported adoption of the report.

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1998 showed that business software piracy alone cost the European Union over 200,000 lost jobs and 9 billion euros in lost tax revenues. The market value of pirated products in the EU is estimated to be at least 6.7 billion euros for the interactive software industry in 1999; nearly 3 billion euros for the business software sector in 1998; 1 billion euros for the film industry in 1998; and 360 billion euros for the music industry in 1998.

The Parliament’s report calls for a number of measures to address piracy and counterfeiting, including:

effective and deterrent criminal penalties and civil sanctions;
strong co-ordination between Member States, the European Commission, and accession candidates in the fight against piracy;
attention to the growing problem of counterfeit CD, DVD and CD-ROM manufacturing; and
the weighing of piracy considerations in EU accession negotiations.