Mr President, Mrs Fourtou tackled a very complex issue. In order to achieve framework legislation, I believe that a lot of work will have to be done in this Parliament’s next parliamentary term. I must congratulate my colleague Mrs Fourtou because I believe that she has put together the best of the possible compromises. As with any compromise, however, I did unfortunately find some shortcomings in this report. For example, even providing for potentially effective instruments to combat activities such as peer to peer or fair sharing, does not allow for the content provider to be fully protected, a situation which risks seriously compromising the reliability of any library. The report is directed solely at crimes committed on a commercial scale and not more generally at infringements of intellectual property rights regardless of how or by whom they are committed. A lot of attention clearly needs to be given to this point in order to find a point of balance. This was a long task that lasted many months. I do, however, remember that, from the outset, the objective in terms of protecting copyright was to combat and stop the phenomenon which, alongside counterfeiting and piracy, allows material protected by copyright to be used illegally to the detriment of the work of all content providers who are legitimately building up the value chain for the use of audiovisual products. Particularly in future, we need to reflect further on the issue of the amount of private use that has increased exponentially thanks to the impetus provided by digital technology via broadband or any other advanced technological platform. This will cause a significant and quantifiable commercial prejudice for all the content providers that base their operating model on the legal distribution of content, subject to contractual agreement with the parties entitled. In this area, too, we need to consider the consequences of the new legislation on telecommunications. In fact, not only does the wording of the proposal for a directive lose sight of some important aims, but it does not even constitute an effective deterrent against infringement because, in the long process in which the various proposals were made, the possibility disappeared of compensating for the two-fold prejudice in the form of loss of profit and loss suffered. I confirm that, in the short term, to obtain an effective instrument, we need to give maximum support to the rapporteur, Mrs Fourtou, and that, in future, we must do a lot of work in this area. I have two final remarks, one relating to Recital 22. This states that prohibitory measures can be taken against intermediaries whose services are used by third parties only to infringe industrial property rights and not, as provided for in Articles 10 and 15, intellectual property rights. Such a discrepancy between the text of the regulation and that of the Recital is not without importance, because it signifies an intention to support an interpretation whereby the term intellectual property contained in the text of the articles actually refers only to cases of intellectual property. I therefore call on Mrs Fourtou to table an oral amendment in which ‘industrial property right’ is replaced by ‘intellectual property right’. In this regard, I am thinking about Italian producers protected by geographical indications, who, in a situation of this type, could not obtain an injunction in other European countries against, for example, traders, carriers or advertisers who sell, transport and publicise counterfeit Italian products. A final comment on Article 16. I think that it is really important that the final phrase of Recital 23a is reintroduced as a final paragraph of this article. In the absence of such regulatory specification, you might think in many countries that if – after the person in possession of counterfeit goods in good faith has paid compensation – the judge waived the prohibition of the sale, and exclusion from the commercial chain, of these products, they would be authorised for any commercial use. If we think, for example, about the whole medical field, this becomes totally unacceptable.

Political group: PPE-DE