EU developments
The Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (2004/48/EC)
was implemented by means of the 41st update to the
Civil Procedure Rules 
, and the Intellectual Property (Enforcement, etc) Regulations 2006.
This Directive should provide a sound and harmonised approach to the enforcement of civil for intellectual property rights across the European Community. However, as the Directive does not include criminal sanctions, the Commission have made further proposals following the judgement in the European Court of Justice Case (C-176/03) that confirmed that the Commission have the power to propose a harmonised approach to criminal sanctions if such measures are essential for the completion of the internal market.
The European Parliament (EP) has adopted its
report on the above proposal and the Council’s discussions of the proposal are continuing. We have a
number of concerns with this proposal regarding the Commission’s competence to harmonise criminal sanctions
(see “The Criminal law Competence of the EC: follow up report ”) and the general
scope of the proposal (the EP recommend the exclusion of patents). The proposal has been considered
by the UK parliament, but it id held under scrutiny pending further information
/discussion.
With the Ministry of Justice held a stakeholder meeting to discuss recent
developments 26 June. There was a broad discussion of the scope of the proposed Directive. Since the
meeting a report on European Parliament’s first reading has been published and a
report of the “latest Council Working Party on Substantive Criminal Law discussion ”
(4 June).
October 2007
