The committee voted to impose fines of at least €300,000 and four years' imprisonment in serious cases and €100,000 in minor cases. The committee also voted for 'Joint Investigation Teams' to be set up, in which the holders of an allegedly infringed intellectual property right could be part of the investigations, alongside with the police.
Although the Council is expected to back the directive, it is likely to be attacked before the Court for its possible lack of a proper legal foundation (see 'Positions').
The initial proposals were criticised by a wide range of industries, including computer and software manufacturers, telecom operators, generic medicines manufacturers and trademark holders, for failing to fence the Directive's scope in on the problem of commercial counterfeiting. A further point of criticism was that the draft would also introduce criminal measures for alleged infringements of unexamined intellectual property rights, such as pending or contested patent applications.
The Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee voted to limit the scope to the following intellectual property rights:
- Copyright and related rights;
- sui generis rights of a database maker;
- rights of the creator of a topography of a semi-conductor product;
- trademark rights;
- design rights;
- geographical indications, and;
- trade names.
Stakeholders criticised that the draft risked criminalising even small-scale infringements for personal use, such as copying the content of a DVD to a computer's hard disk or making a back-up of a copy-protected CD. The Committee voted to cover only "intentional infringements on a commercial scale", where "commercial scale" is defined as "any infringement committed to obtain a commercial advantage", and "intentional" as "deliberate and conscious".
