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Concern has been raised by a memo sent to European policy-makers by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries asking European ISPs to filter the content transferred by their networks. The music and film industry continues to pressure from the EU regulators for control on the Internet, through ISPs.
The issue raises even more concern as some European politicians seem comfortable to consumer's communications being interfered with and controlled by ISPs on behalf of rightholders. In November 2007, the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) handed to the Parliament a report amending a previous Culture and Education Committee report, calling ISPs "to apply filtering measures to prevent copyright infringements" with the purpose to "rethink the critical issue of intellectual property".
Following this ITRE report, the EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Europe has sent a letter to the members of the Culture and Education Committee, showing how damaging Internet filtering would be from several points of view.
EFF points out that filtering by ISPs is inefficient, doing very little to address the rightsholders' concerns while affecting artists, researcher or teachers, as filtering devices would be unable to evaluate the exceptions or limitations of the copyright that these categories benefit of.
Internet content filtering will bring significant damages to the citizens' individual rights "in their roles as consumers, artists and educators" as well as additional costs for network reconfigurations that will be borne by ISPs and therefore passed on to their consumers.
EFF believes that:" Any country that has a centralized system in place to pry into all its citizen's private communications, and then pre-emptively sever those which it deems "unsuitable", creates both a very disturbing precedent, and a dangerously powerful tool vulnerable to misuse."
The vote on the final document will take place on the 21 January 2008 in the Culture and Education Committee.
Music Industry Pressures EU Politicians for Filtered Internet (7.12.2007)
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/12/music-industry-europe-filter-pres...
EFF Europe letter to the Culture and Education Committee
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/effeurope/CULT-filtering-letter.pdf
ISPs - Technical options for addressing online copyright infringement
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/effeurope/ifpi_filtering_memo.pdf
Network Filtering: Limiting Cultural Industries, Damaging the Internet
(12.12.2007)
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/effeurope/NetworkFiltering.pdf
Draft report on cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon strategy -
Committee on Culture and Education (18.09.2007)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/file.jsp?id=5498632
Draft Opinion of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy for the
Committee on Culture and Education on Cultural industries in Europe
(20.09.2007)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/pa/685/6855...
Amendements to the opinion - ITRE Committee (31.10.2007)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/am/692/6924...
Draft report - Guy Bono - Cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon
Strategy (26.11.2007)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/registre/recherche/NoticeDetaillee.cfm?d...