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tijir writes in to point to the latest round of proposed changes to European copyright law, and as was expected, there’s something in there for just about everyone to hate. While it doesn’t include software patents (the EU learned that lesson last year), it bizarrely shifts all the blame for copyright infringement from end users to service providers. It takes the “inducement” concepts of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, which has created all sorts of problems, and puts it into the law for Europe. Not surprisingly, that makes the various copyright lobbies happy. They like being able to go after the big providers, rather than individuals — even if the big service providers haven’t actually done anything wrong. However, the draft law apparently also then clears the way for individual users to download what they want for non-commercial use. Private, non-commercial use of infringed products is allowed — which pisses off those very same copyright lobbies. Effectively, what this really does is take all the liability off of end users, and dumps a fair portion of it on the providers of the tools and services they use. That doesn’t seem fair or reasonable, but apparently someone thought it made for a good regulatory proposal.

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