Movie & Music Industry Proposals ISP Self-Regulation

European Digital Rights reports in its latest news letter on the efforts of the movie (MPA) and music (IFPI) industry to come to a self-regulation of ISPs. In order to curb copyright infringements the industry asks providers to:

• "remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders".
• "require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement by an established right holder defence organisation or by right holder(s) whose intellectual property is being infringed"
• terminate contracts of recidivist
• implement instant messaging to communicate with infringers
• implement filtering technologies to block sites that are 'substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services.'
• voluntarily store data for copyright enforcement

Several of these propositions blatantly violate the privacy protection of users. Advance disclosure of one's identity to aid copyright enforcement would be a significant weakening of users (defense) rights. The content industry could skip getting a court order to require ISPs to link subscriber's names to IP addresses.

Furthermore, these are just more examples of a tendency to focus on internet intermediaries for law enforcement. The current restricted liability is subject to renewed scrutiny, and might be widened at the expense of ISPs, or better, its subscribers. Speaking of which, the letter also points to this gem:

"To enforce terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities."

Yes, forget about that digital revolution of production and distribution models. It will be a top down world after all, if the incumbent industry can help it.