Copyright Extensions and ISP Filtering: Breaking EU Culture, One Amendment at a Time

Posted by Danny O'Brien

As you may recall, the European Parliament's forthcoming report on the Cultural Industries has become the latest target of lobbying by the recording industry. First, they attempted to insert language that advocated that European ISPs filter and block their own users on the basis of suspected infringement. 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 in 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.

Related Issues: EFF Europe, Intellectual Property, International

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