Brussels muscles in on copyright scene

The people who tried to straighten our bananas and classify our carrots as a fruit have brought us another piece of fruity legislation.

Our chums in Brussels have made public their thoughts about copyright, and legislation not due to affect us until the end of next year. (That's law-making for you - if one year is worth seven to an internet worker or a dog, it's worth about six weeks to a lawyer.)

The internet community and right thinking people everywhere should have a chance to knock this legislation on the head before it gets near the statute book.

But if it does make it to law in its present form, the big publishing companies, all our old friends at AOL Time Warner, Disney, News Corp and Vivendi will have a whole raft of new powers to control how we buy, store and use their electronic products.

Under this new law, it could be a crime to interfere with the copy protection on an e-book or a DVD. That's whether you're intending to copy stuff illegally or not, whether you're an encryption researcher or not. Touch it and you could be in jail.

Under this new law, what we now think of as 'fair use' of a copyright work could also be made illegal. Say you're a teacher, and you want to photocopy a book to show your students. If it's an e-book, forget it - the software won't let you unless you pay for every copy you make. If you want to make Braille copies for the visually impaired, well, forget that too.

The European directive has some rather woolly 'protections' which are meant to defend this fair use. But the lawyers we spoke to felt these wouldn't guarantee much. One described them as a fig leaf. Not very reassuring.

As writers, we at silicon.com believe in copyright protection as much as anyone. But there has to be balance. Making encryption research illegal is making an ass of the law.

There has to be balance, and balance this is not. It's heavily loaded in favour of the media behemoths, and it must be stopped.