(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

On 16 March 2007 the Bulgarian special forces for combating organized crime ordered the major ISPs to filter the access to and from the web site arenabg.com, a torrent tracker hosted in the US, claiming that it was the source of copyright infringement activities. Only three big ISPs accepted to do so while the others considered the action as illegal.

The ordinance was withdrawn by the Police after a few days, following a lot of criticism from lawyers that questioned the legality of such an action. EDRI-member ISOC Bulgaria was the only organization of Internet users to publicly criticize these actions.

The police also arrested the owner of the web site who was however released by the court as the police had not given any evidence that "the defendant has caused any copyright infringement".

One of the biggest points of the discussion was whether the file sharing and web traffic filtering technologies are legally acceptable.

In her article "Technology vs Law", Nelly Ognyanova, lecturer in Media Law at the Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, considers that "there is no liability for the creation and dissemination of technologies, which have a lawful use. There is a liability for breaking the law."

The Bulgarian authorities have placed the equality sign between torrents and piracy, while actually torrents are useful ensuring a fast and efficient communication. The fact that copyrighted files could be transmitted through them does not make them illegal as instruments. The file sharing act is the illegal one not the technology used for that.

Ognyanova also thinks the protection of privacy is not less important than the protection of intellectual property and that there must be a proportionality between the limitations of one's rights and the gravity of one supposed acts.

She also pointed out that " The Internet providers are the least ones to have a responsibility (for Internet content) if they have any at all. Nevertheless, the Bulgarian providers have been ordered to filter the access to the website arenabg.com, hosted in the United States."

The Bulgarian Interior Minister wanted to link the Police acts with the fight against piracy and protection of the copyrighted works. He also claimed that : "Limiting access to websites is unpopular measure in Bulgaria but widely used in Europe."

The Commission on Legal Matters of the European Parliament adopted on 20 March 2007 a draft of the IPRED directive, but the "commercial scale infringement", that previously included the IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) infringements by private users for personal use was excluded.

Nelly Ognyanova - Technology vs. Law (30.03.2007)
http://blog.veni.com/?p=205

Nelly Ognyanova - A Global Initiative, Suspicious Methods (30.03.2007)
http://blog.veni.com/?p=204

Internet Providers in Bulgaria pushed to limit unlicensed content distribution (16.03.2007)
http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/internet-providers-in-bulgaria-pushed...

IPRED2 adopted by the EP Legal Affairs committee (28.03.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.6/ipred2