Mr President, firstly, and like other Members, I would like to congratulate Mrs Fourtou on her excellent work and also express my regret at the speech by Mr Turmes, who should not really worry about intellectual property since he has only come to criticise Mrs Fourtou and her relatives and has not been able to remain in this Chamber for the whole debate. I believe that the fact that certain Members of this House have family relatives – and I would be grateful if Mr Turmes would remain in the House – does not prevent them from acting in it, particularly since what we are discussing, this Directive in the field of enforcing intellectual property rights, does not exclusively affect right holders, but all consumers. It is also we consumers who have to ensure that the protection of intellectual property rights is guaranteed, because we want the products we buy to be original and authentic and we do not want to be deceived by people who violate intellectual property rights. I therefore believe that to try to use Mrs Fourtou’s relatives to discredit her work is not worthy of a Member of this House. There are two aspects which have been fully debated this morning. One of them relates to commercial purposes. It is true that we have modified the Commission's proposal, which was restricted to acts carried out for commercial purposes. We need to go a little further; I believe that the rapporteur’s proposal and the compromise amendments are balanced, and that we had to ensure that anybody carrying out any act against industrial or intellectual property could be prosecuted, whether that act was for commercial purposes or not. In reply to Mr Fiori, who spoke before me, the inclusion of industrial property is important, and in the case of Spain in particular, since the Spanish legislation in the field of trademarks and patents is considered industrial property rather than intellectual property. The definition has therefore been extended to both. With regard to the procedure, mentioned by Mr Cappato and Mr Berenguer, what we intended is something very important: to obtain a directive which could enter into force before 1 May 2004. It is therefore true that Mrs Fourtou has had to make certain efforts to reach agreement and that the proposal we are voting on today in this Parliament is not exactly the same as the one voted for in committee. Nevertheless, many of the aspects which were approved in the committee are included in what we are voting on today, apart from the two points I have referred to: commercial purposes and patents. There are many other aspects that we have revised from the Commission's initial proposal, such as, for example, the reduction of procedures and costs for the applicant, in order to speed up and guarantee respect for their intellectual property rights; the simplification of the guarantees to be provided by the applicant in the event of defending their industrial or intellectual property rights; the establishment of compensation in the event of an infringement of industrial or intellectual property and, finally, considerations relating to the destruction of objects used for counterfeiting or the counterfeit objects themselves. These are other aspects of the Commission's proposal that we have modified and which, as the Commission has said, make this directive sufficiently balanced for the times we are living in.

Political group: PPE-DE