After intense lobbying by the music and film industries, the European Union is proposing tough new sanctions against a wide range of copyright infringers. Its Directive on Intellectual Property Enforcement, due to be voted on by MEPs next Tuesday, is perfectly reasonable as far as it affects criminal gangs that sell pirated DVDs or unlicensed software. Where it could prove dangerously repressive is its failure to distinguish clearly between these organised gangs and the unintentional, amateur copyright infringers.

The directive, being pushed through by Janelly Fourtou, MEP (whose husband happens to run the Vivendi media empire), could prove even more draconian than the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), lately being used to sue American schoolchildren. Because the directive does not define the scope of “intellectual property rights”, it could theoretically let EU states jail millions of ordinary consumers who swap song files, scan photographs or play copy-protected CDs on their PCs. As critics such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation have calculated, anyone who unwittingly infringes copyright — even if it has no effect on the market — could potentially have their assets seized, bank accounts frozen and home searched.

It is easy to see how the proposed sanctions will be used to strike fear in ordinary consumers and legitimate small businesses. There will be well-publicised raids on file-swappers’ homes, without any prior court hearing. Academics who question the security of commercial software will find themselves accused of breaching the owners’ rights. Free-software groups will face legal challenges from larger firms based on unwarranted intellectual-property claims. And over time competition, and consumer rights, will be further whittled away.

Copyright is never an easy subject to get people excited about. But if you do not welcome the idea of a British DMCA, tell your MEP before the vote next week.

• Ricin, as we all know, is easy to make using a recipe widely available on the internet. Or is it? Having seen this ominous certainty reported everywhere from CNN to The New York Times George Smith, a national-security specialist with the GlobalSecurity.Org website, decided to investigate. The original “How to Make Ricin” page appears on an anarchic website called The Temple of the Screaming Electron, with the warning: “This stuff is extrodinarily poisonous — arsenic takes 100 granuals to kill someone, ricin takes 1-2 granuals.” Those spelling mistakes, by the way, are a hint about the original source, which, Smith points out, started out as a teen hacker bulletin board. He concludes that the “recipe” is nothing but a “crock” by an imaginative teenager — wrongly concluding, for instance, that ricin might be found in castor oil. That has not stopped journalists falling for the myth. Still, at least we don’t need to close down the internet quite yet.

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