Big 4’s IFPI demands Feral Filtering
p2pnet news | Freedom:- A warning from the EFF’s Danny O’Brien on Deep Links from the beginning of the month is picking up speed, with references on Ars Technica shortly after O’Brien’s post and, more recently, AfterDawn, dslreports, P2P Blog and TorrentFreak, to name a few.
They all centre on a bid by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s IFPI to establish feral filtering.
As Ars summed it up:
"Imagine a world in which a single industry could control an entire continent’s access to particular web sites, force ISPs to install expensive deep packet inspection gear that would search the complete Internet data streams of millions of users, and force Internet applications to conform to its design parameters or risk being blocked. If you’re a European consumer, this might sound like a paranoid dystopia, but it’s actually a vision of paradise —- if paradise were designed by the IFPI."
Here’s the original post and under it, a letter to the the Culture and Education Committee from the EFF’s Erik Josefsson.
The music and film industry continues to pursue its idea of a politically "corrected" Internet – one that they imagine could protect their old business models without requiring any extra costs on their part.
This time, the fix is Internet-wide filtering. In a memo to European policy-makers, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries has called upon ISPs in Europe to filter the content sent across their networks, block protocols used by their customers, and cut off access to persistently infringing sites from the Net (you can read their full memo here). Left unsaid in it was the obvious implication: if ISPs aren’t willing to comply, EU regulators should force the ISP’s hand.
Disturbingly, European politicians seem open to the idea of ISPs policing and interfering with their customers’ communications on behalf of rightsholders. Last month, the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) tabled an amendment to a Parliamentary report that changed an innocuous request to "rethink the critical issue of intellectual property", into a call for "internet service providers to apply filtering measures to prevent copyright infringements".
This week, EFF Europe sent a letter to the members of the Culture and Education Committee, whose original report the ITRE Commitee was amending. We pointed out that some of the groups hardest hit by blanket filtering measures Internet would be artists and teachers themselves. Pre-emptive blocking and filtering by machines could make no evaluation of whether the transmitted content is permitted by the limitations and exceptions carved out for those groups in copyright law. IFPI says that all "unlicensed" files should be blocked: in other words, researchers using the quotation exception, teachers using education exceptions, or artists using their rights to parody or pastiche, would have to beg for a license or find their conversations banned from the Net.
Building such filtering and censorship tools is not just bad for creators and education, though; it’s bad for society. 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. Perhaps the music industry’s European lobbyists have lost sight of the serious collateral damage their proposals would cause, but European citizens and their elected policy-makers should not.
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Dear Member of the Cultural Committee,
I represent EFF-Europe, an NGO focused on issues related to technology and consumers’ rights. EFFEurope is very concerned with the recent opinion of the ITRE committee on the Guy Bono report on the Cultural industries in Europe, which calls upon "internet service providers [ISPs] to apply filtering measures to prevent copyright infringement". EFF’s experience has been that filtering is an overbroad, ineffective measure that will do little to practically address the concerns of major rightsholders while imposing serious costs on the individual rights of European citizens in their roles as consumers, artists and educators.
Furthermore, filtering as a means to combat digital piracy is an unnecessary solution. It was not mentioned in the Rapporteur’s original draft. Rather, the Rapporteur simply urged the Commission to rethink the critical issue of intellectual property; he did not promote a particular solution.
Below, please find some of our objections to requiring ISPs to use filtering. I would be happy to discuss them in more detail with your office and provide additional information to substantiate the claim that filtering is the wrong policy choice.
1. Filtering Would Curtail Existing Consumer and Artistic Rights
The majority of copyrighted material online is not produced by major rightsholders but by Internet users themselves. Users, both as consumers and as creators, have their own rights under copyright law to re-use and distribute content. These rights would be affected by filtering and blocking technology installed for detecting and removing major rightsholder content.
Many European countries, for example, have limitations on copyright for the purposes of private copying, or for the use of the disabled. Other exceptions permit the use of content for criticism, political use, or parody. No technological system could determine whether these legitimate exceptions were in play during the transmission of content. Instead, all use not explicitly permitted by rightsholders would be banned from the Net, severely restricting the exercise of these rights by Europeans acting as artists, consumers, and citizens. This will have particularly strong ramifications in the growing online field of "user generated content" (UGC), which frequently relies on balanced and flexible copyright enforcement to create legitimate new cultural works.
2. Filtering Would Place Burdens on Education and Research
Filtering assumes that all unauthorised distribution of rightsholder content is infringing. Under European copyright, this is not the case. There are numerous limitations and exceptions to copyright, in particular those connected with education and research uses of content. By pre-emptively interfering with all distribution, ISP filters would prevent educational institutions from using the Internet in the pursuit of their many legitimate uses of copyrighted material.
3. Filtering Would Do Nothing to Prevent Copyright Infringement
Currently, most Internet communications are sent in a form that is easily examined by intermediaries such as ISPs. The exceptions to this are communications where there is a high risk of unwanted third parties seeking access to the confidential content, such as credit-card transactions or when accessing private web services. In these cases, communications are strongly encrypted so that third-party surveillance is not possible.
Introducing filtering technology at ISP facilities would simply cause infringing Net users to encrypt their communications in the same way, eliminating any chance that these filters could successfully target these transfers. Such encrypted content cannot be examined or blocked by third parties such as ISPs; if it could, the financial institutions would be equally at risk.
4. Filtering Would Limit European Innovation
[The] IFPI has proposed that some filtering take place at the "protocol level", which is to say some Internet services should be entirely blocked because they can be used for infringing distribution. While Internet protocols – including email and the Web – may be used for infringement, the protocols that IFPI particularly targets are "peer to peer" services, on the assumption that these services contain the majority of infringing practices. All peer-to-peer services also provide unique, non-infringing uses. Peerto- peer services like Skype and BitTorrent allow European consumers to take advantage of cheap and innovative ways of using the Net. Blocking or banning such services would distort the market and reduce the effectiveness of European Net use.
5. Filtering Would Weaken European Privacy Norms
In order to introduce the filtering systems requested by groups like IFPI, ISPs would have to install technology that would inspect the contents of every data packet passing through their networks – including private communications between individuals.
Such blanket permission for third-parties to pry into communication data would set a disturbing precedent for privacy in the European Union. By creating not only the assumption that communication providers should analyse and block specific communications, but also encouraging building into every Internet peering center devices that would facilitate such surveillance, the safeguards provided by the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Data Protection Directive would be seriously undermined.
6. Filtering Would Impose a High Cost on Consumers
Packet-filtering and analysis is a process that requires a large amount of processing power and network reconfiguration. The cost of creating this monitoring network presumably would be borne by ISPs themselves, rather than the rightsholders that are lobbying for this equipement. The high financial cost of ineffectively policing the infringement of a limited amount of content would inevitably be passed to the individual European consumer.
What is truly needed in the European cultural and economic space is for "all those active in the sector to join forces and seek [intellectual property] solutions equitable to all", as the Rapporteur’s original text proposes. ISP filtering is an ill-considered and damaging quick fix. With liberal licensing opportunities such as those used by Creative Commons works and open source software, and the democratisation of cultural and educational resources online, the Internet needs more flexible IP regulation, not the robotic enforcement of blanket distribution restrictions.
We urge you to reject ISP filtering. It is the wrong policy choice.
Thank you so much for you consideration of our concerns. Please feel free to contact me at xxx if you have any questions or would like any additional information.
Sincerely,
Erik Josefsson
European Affairs Coordinator
EFF-Europe
Stay tuned.
Also See:
Deep Links – Music Industry Pressures EU Politicians for Filtered Internet, December 7, 2007
Ars Technica – IFPI’s European Christmas list: content filtering and P2P blocking, December 9, 2007
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December 27th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I have recently seen a 1 TB USB hard drive in the store for less than $350. This combined with a laptop computer and a commonly available wireless router can mean a community wide file sharing network with very little interference from big brother. DVD’s, Thumb drives, etc are widely available and can hold tremendous amounts of data. If Big Corporations and Big Government succeed in locking down the Internet, we will simply create our own networks. Many people have already done so. With lasers, unused radio frequencies, and home brew DSL, hackers, amateur radio operators, and phone phreaks can use current technology to put together something much better than what we currently have.
I remember the days of computer communication before the Internet was widely available. We used dial up bulletin board systems that communicated with each other in an ad hoc network called Fidonet. Nowdays, commonly available wired and wireless equipment can take the place of the telephone line and transmit much more data locally. Cities can be very well served by such a network, and rural areas can be served depending upon population and effort. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and it is not going back in.