YNOT EUROPE – The European Parliament wants to see the European Commission create a unified copyright law to be enforced continent-wide. Current intellectual property laws vary too much by country, commissioners said this week.

“[The Parliament] is of the opinion that the possibility of proceeding against infringers of intellectual property rights should be created in the European legal framework,” according to a report from French member Marielle Gallo. The report, adopted by a Parliament vote of 328 to 245, requests the Commission conduct “an assessment of the ways to strengthen and upgrade the legal framework with respect to the Internet.”

Gallo suggests the Commission review the 2004 Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights and amend the directive in ways that would strengthen EU members’ ability to pursue and punich infringers.

“[The Parliament] does not share the Commission’s certitude that the current civil enforcement framework in the EU is effective and harmonized to the extent necessary for the proper functioning of the internal market,” Gallo’s report notes.

In addition to increased enforcement powers, the report suggests the EU investigate ways to encourage creation of better legitimate markets for content.

“Support for and development of the provision of a diversified, attractive, high-profile, legal range of goods and services for consumers may help to tackle the phenomenon of online infringement,” Gallo wrote in the report. “In this respect, the lack of a functioning internal European digital market constitutes an important obstacle to the development of legal online offers and that the EU runs the risk of condemning to failure efforts to develop the legitimate online market if it does not recognize that fact and make urgent proposals to address it.

“[The Commission should] propose a comprehensive strategy on [intellectual property rights] which will remove obstacles to creating a single market in the online environment and adapt the European legislative framework in the field of IPRs to current trends in society as well as to technical developments.”

Among the suggestions in the report are the adoption of “multi-territory licenses” that could “complement this existing growth in services which are legal and which meet consumer demand for easier ubiquitous, instant and customized access to content.”

In large part, the European Commission agrees.

“There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material,” Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said earlier this year. “The problem is that it’s illegal, and it’s not monetized. We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed.

“Creating the legal Digital Single Market will lead to a wealth of options for citizens,” she added. “It will strike a blow against piracy and benefit authors and artists. And it will do this without endangering the open architecture that is essential for the internet. It is obviously common sense to fix problems like this.”