On 24 March 2005 the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior issued a radical order to Bulgaria's largest internet providers. Within 7 days the ISPs "must remove all free hosting servers which offer works, audio records, entertaining or business software, images, pictures, books, graphical logos, etc." and notify the department. Remarkably, the order isn't limited to copyright infringement, but bluntly seems to ban all content on free hosting servers.
ISPs in Bulgaria are not forbidden to offer free hosting though, but can only provide free servers larger than 100 MB to identified customers. "More than 100 MB of webspace should be given only to customers with a signed user contract, accompanied with a copy of their ID card or relevant valid document for identification."
The order was issued by colonel Boyko Donchev Nikolov, chief of the department 'Intellectual property, trademark, computer crimes and gambling' within the Ministry of the Interior, in order to stop possible copyright infringement. But the order also obliges providers to remove any other websites, images, pictures and texts that violate Bulgarian law, such as "racial hatred propaganda, pornography, pedophilia, nazism, and websites for gambling and etc."
A spokesperson from provider BOL told the german e-zine Heise that ISPs are very concerned about the impossible time frame to obtain identity papers from many of their customers. As a first measure providers will stop their internal search engines, as they might lead customers to copyright infringing contents.
Veni Markovski from EDRI-member Internet Society Bulgaria comments: "We consider this as an effort by the Police to make ISPs fully liable for the content their customers provide. Currently, ISPs in Bulgaria can only be held liable if they are first properly notified (on paper) by the police about illegal content and secondly would refuse to remove the content. The order seems to be part of a P.R. campaign from the Ministry of the Interior against illegal content. Several people have recently been charged with online teenage pornography, and they use the momentum to create good will with holders of intellectual property rights."
Bulgarien: Webspace nur gegen Personalausweis (31.03.2005)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/58114