Big Music ISP filter plan flops
p2pnet news | Freedom:- The European Parliament report on the Cultural Industries has become Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s latest target, with their IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) doing the sighting.
“The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has been lobbying politicians of the European Parliament to force ISP`s to identify, filter, block and remove copyright infringing content from the Internet,” says TorrentFreak.
But, “according to an early report, it appears that all three anti-piracy measures have been defeated.”
“First, they attempted to insert language that advocated that European ISPs filter and block their own users on the basis of suspected infringement,” says the EFF’s (Electronic Froentier Foundation) Danny OBrien, going on >>>
As we explained to European Members of Parliament, such policies would not only harm the privacy and security of Net users – they would not even work to combat infringement. Like DRM, everyone would lose, including the music industry and artists that IFPI seeks to protect.
But if ISP spying on customers and users denied access to the Net on the hearsay of rightsholders were not bad enough, the recording industry is now seeking another addition (amendment 82), advocating the extension of copyright “to protect artists who risk seeing their work fall within the public domain their lifetime, and to consider the competitive disadvantage posed by less generous protection terms in Europe than in the United States”.
As five Nobel-prize winning economists including Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase and Kenneth Arrow petitioned in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, and the recent Gowers Report in the UK concluded, copyright term extension is unjustified both as a protection to current artists (who rarely earn much from far future extensions), or as an economic positive for society as a whole. Yet the music industry, fearful of losing tight control of its own back catalog, still continues to advocate for more copyright, no matter the cost.
The Guy Bono report is the tip of the iceberg for this kind of rightsholder lobbying, at both a Brussels and a national level. The report has no legal force, but by gently dropping these unfounded policy ideas into its pages and putting them in front of politicians and civil servants, IFPI and others can claim that they are uncontroversial, familiar solutions when the time comes to write the real laws
It’s painful to watch an otherwise thoughtful report on the cultural industries by the European Parliament be buried under the lobbying agenda of the music industry – especially when its suggestions go so far against economics and common sense. We can only hope that the committee can retrieve the original paper from this last-minute bargaining, and keep these ridiculous ideas on the policy fringes where they deserve to remain.
However, from all appearances, the IFPI won’t be around in its present form.
EMI says it no longer wants to subsidise the Big 4 enforcement agency and plans are afoot to merge it with the labels’ RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
As things stand, the two units operate as separate units.
Stay tuned, and also see Mandatory ISP filtering in Canada?
Also See:-
TorrentFreak – IFPI Fails to Force ISPs to Become Anti-Piracy Enforcers, January 22, 2008
EFF – Copyright Extensions and ISP Filtering: Breaking EU Culture, One Amendment at a Time, January 18, 2008
won’t be around – EMI dumps IFPI: RIAA, IFPI merger, January 11, 2008
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