It's been a long time since the last news on IPRED2, the proposed EU directive that would criminalize large chunks of civil intellectual property law across Europe. That's because the EU's central authorities weren't entirely sure that they had the powers to get away with it.

The extent of the European Union's regulatory powers have been in limbo since the rejecting of an EU Constitution. While that mess is resolved, key institutions like the Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council have often had to wait for decisions from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to clarify what they can and can't do.

Now, the ECJ has ruled on if and how the EU can legislate in the field of criminal law. Case C-440/05 is a complex suit, but as far as it affects IPRED2, it effectively says: yes, the EU can make criminal law if it thinks they are necessary to make sure its other rules are followed - but no, it cannot dictate to its member states the type and level of the penalty you receive if you break those laws.

So out, for sure, goes the requirements in the current IPRED2 drafts about €100,000 charges and four year prison sentences. But supporters of IPRED2 will still argue that the EU still has the right criminalise huge chunks of each country's copyright and trademark law in one sweep, and so IPRED2 should go ahead.

The next question is: will it go ahead? That's up to the Council, the group of ministers from each EU member state. The European Parliament says they'll look over the directive next month, on December 6th.

Already, many of them have heard from their own citizens about how bad IPRED2 would be for businesses and individuals.

What we'd like to know is: who is in charge of preparing what your country will say about IPRED2? Usually, as we've said, it's someone in the Ministry of Justice, but finding out who exactly to contact can be hard.

If you have a few minutes and would like to help us battle IPRED2, call your local Justice Ministry and ask them who makes the decisions at the Council on IPRED2 and might accept comments from the public. You can mail them to us at [email protected], and we'll publish a fuller list soon.

The paperwork on IPRED2 has now moved to the Substantial Criminal Law working committee (DROIPEN): the first step before being debated by representatives of each country in the EU's Council of Ministers. DROIPEN's civil servants will discuss the minutiae of the directive this week, at 10am Monday 4th June. You can find the agenda for that discussion here.

Meanwhile, outside of Brussels, member states are working to prepare their positions on IPRED2. The United Kingdom's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is currently collecting comments from British citizens and companies on the directive. Our coalition has contributed a comprehensive policy paper to the UK IPO that you can read and pass on to the Justice Ministry in your own country. Find a copy here.

If you write to your Justice Ministry, suggest that it hold a similar stakeholders meeting on IPRED2. We'll be happy to pass on the details of any planned meeting to others in your country.

The UK is also holding a stakeholder meeting to discuss developments, which will take place at 11am Tuesday 26 June at the Home Office building in London (For more details, see this page or this Upcoming listing. If you're in the UK, you can contact the UK IPO to attend the meeting at the IPO address above.

Don't forget to also write to your parliamentarians, particularly those you think would be interested in IPRED2 but who are not in power. They are likely to know almost nothing about IPRED2 and will want to learn more to scrutinize their own governments' positions. You will soon become the expert they will turn to for more information!

From the internal rumbling around Brussels, it sounds that IPRED2 is going through the JHA (Justice and Home Affairs) route. Its next port of call will be at the Council's Working Group on Substantive Criminal Law (DROIPEN), possibly on June 1.

DROIPEN's job will be to prepare the Council's first reading on the directive. The national government's representatives might come up with a proposal that all Member States agree on, or else they will identify issues that the Ministers of Justice will have to vote on.

If you're an activist, what's important to know is that IPRED2's content can still change during this process. But these transformations will not be as transparent as during the European Parliament's deliberations.

That means that lobbying national governments to introduce fixes to IPRED2 now can lead to better language - language that we already know that many in the European Parliament support.

For instance, in informal discussion last year the Council considered that IPRED2's criminal sanctions should only apply sanctions should only apply, if at all, to EU-wide IP law (not local law that hadn't already been harmonised by the EU). That's something our coalition called for in our Parliamentary amendments. A slight majority of MEPs rejected that limitation, but the Council could restore it.

It also means that vigilance is still necessary. It was only a few months ago that IPRED2 included language that turn companies who unintentionally infringed on patents into criminals. One MEP proposed an amendment that would have made anyone receiving a copyright-infringing item a criminal "fencer" of stolen goods.

Language bad or worse could be inserted by nation states in the next few weeks. When the Council is done, IPRED2 will return for a second parliamentary reading, with all these new proposed changes, good or bad.

We'll be keeping track.

After the vote in the European Parliament (see our DeepLink for the full story), proposed directives like IPRED2 go to the Council of the EU.

The Council has a large and permanent bureacracy in Brussels, and governed by ministers of the national governments of the EU.

The Council is divided into several mini-councils, divided by topic, and attended by specific ministers from each state. For example, the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) council is attended by ministers who deal with the justice system in their own countries - the Home Secretary in Britain, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform in Ireland, die Bundesminister der Justiz in Germany, and so on. The Council of the EU has nine of these mini-councils - and they all meet at different times.

Given that IPRED2 represents a radical leap in the powers of the EU to control national law, you'd think it would now move to the senior ministers in change of the justice system. That would be the JHA, which next meets on June 12.

But we're hearing rumours that the directive is being redirected to the Competitiveness Council, which contains ministers for industry and research. This group meets on May 21, and has no expertise in criminal law: meaning that IPRED2 could be fast-tracked by politicians who may be unaware of its drastic effects on national legal systems' approach to intellectual property.

When the EU decides on where the directive is going next, we'll let you know: keep informed by subscribing to this site's RSS feed, or by bookmarking this page. If you haven't already, you can also sign our petition, and receive email action alerts of the next step in this battle to stop EU innovators, consumers and public servants turned into accidental copycriminals.