The commission's Legal Affairs Committee finalized its preferred language for the bill, shooting down 193 out of 197 amendments aimed at tweaking the legislation one way or another, according to a source from the EU delegation here.
The committee attempted to "steer a medium course" between the many stakeholders on either side of the digital copyright issue, said the source, who asked to remain unnamed.
The European legislation bears broad resemblance to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which the US Congress passed in 1998. Both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the proposed European law sprang out of an Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty to which both the United States and the EU were party.
Like the Digital Millennium legislation, the EU proposal provides express copyright protections to works posted on the Internet. Those protections will allow EU member states to actually lighten existing restrictions on disseminating digital copies of music and other art over the Internet.
Next week the full European parliament will vote on whether to accept the same language approved by the legal affairs committee, according to the EU source.
Should the parliament follow the lead taken by the legal affairs committee, the legislation will still need to clear a handful of procedural hurdles to become law, the source said.
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