A recently published and adopted report from the EU Parliament throws a long-awaited crumb of comfort to the beleaguered European ISP community, braced for legal assault over issues of electronic content copyright.
In France there have been moves to ramp up the obligations placed on ISPs to stop the delivery of illegal material and to punish those who do it with a butch-sounding ‘three strikes and you’re out’ sanction against copyright-breakers.
With the European Commission also known to be girding its loins for some ISP-bashing - cheered on by Europe’s powerful content industries - a group of sympathetic European parliamentarians (especially from Sweden) decided that the fight was becoming a little one-sided.
Disturbed at the way the political winds were blowing for the ISP community they successfully won an amendment to the recently-published Bono Report (nothing to do with the always-sunglassed Irish pop combo singer and poverty fighter) adopted last week by the European Parliament and named after MEP Guy Bono, which tilts the playing-field back a little towards the ISPs.
So what? you may ask.
Well, according to an expert an the specialised area that is European politics, this amendment could be significant and might spike the guns of the pro-copyright “flog ‘em and hang ‘em’ brigade (now led by French President, Nicholas Sarkozy).
Under the French proposals, for instance, ISPs would be forced to adopt an active policing policy on behalf of the content industries. This would include network filtering, cutting off P2P traffic flows that contained ‘pirated’ material, in addition to taking down material flagged up by copyright owners.
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