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Deutsch: Kommission findet Lösung für Notice and Takedown und sucht nun das P...
On 15 December 2010, the European Commission held its third meeting on "public private cooperation to counter the dissemination of illegal content in the European Union." The first meeting took place in November 2009 and the second in May 2010.
After the previous meeting, the European Commission received written comments jointly from EDRi and EuroISPA as well as a variety of industry players. Six months later, the Commission finally reacted to that feedback, sending participants revised recommendations on the evening before the meeting.
The Commission tried to open discussions on its recommendations for extra-judicial takedown of material that has been accused of being illegal, on grounds of containing child abuse, racism/xenophobia or terrorist content. However, both industry and EDRi demanded repeatedly that the Commission finally should define the problems that it believes it is addressing by this initiative. Unfortunately, the Commission steadfastly refused to do this. The Commission also chose not to answer a direct question as to how this initiative complies with either Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which requires a legal basis for interferences with communication) and the 2003 Interinstitutional Agreement, which obliges the Commission not to promote co- or self-regulatory measures in relation to matters of significance to fundamental rights.
In the afternoon session, DG Information Society of the European Commission explicitly stated that some Member States do not devote adequate resources to addressing online child abuse and that it is "at the bottom of the (priority) list" in some European countries. As a result, the Commission is focusing on takedown of the criminal websites and is developing statistical tools to assess the speed with which sites are deleted.
Contradicting repeated statements about the "need" to block websites in the USA, Russia and Ukraine, the Commission explained that significant progress was being made in those countries. This may not necessarily be such good news - exporting a system where criminals are "punished" by having their websites deleted rather than facing a judicial procedure in full respect of the rule of law does little to respect the EU's obligation to support democracy and the rule of law internationally.
The Commission then invited an anti-spam initiative in order to allegedly demonstrate how Internet intermediaries can regulate the online environment.
The meeting closed with industry stressing the lack of clarity about where the process was meant to go, the relevance of the "recommendations" published by the Commission and the fact that lack of resources in law enforcement agencies cannot be solved by industry actions.
The Commission may or may not provide more guidance on whatever problem that this process is supposed to solve, but asks for industry input on this. Comments are requested by the end of January, with a working group meeting planned for February and another "plenary" meeting in April.
Draft Recommendations
http://www.edri.org/files/draft_recommendations.pdf
EDRi-gram: Joint EDRi/EuroISPA response to previous round of consultations
(28.07.2010)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number8.15/edri-euroispa-notice-takedown-...
(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)