Analysis: Three Strikes Strikes Out - The End of ISP Policing?

Authored by Paul Sweeting on April 11, 2008 - 10:30am.

You can forget about French president Nicolas Sarkozy's original proposal for policing piracy on the Internet becoming a model for the rest of Europe. Not only has the plan been dropped from the French Parliament's current legislative agenda, but the European Parliament this week approved a resolution harshly denouncing a lynch-pin of the French plan: the proposal to require ISPs to monitor their subscribers' Internet use and cut off those found repeatedly to be downloading illegal copyrighted material.

Called the "three-strikes" rule, the proposal in the original French plan would have called for ISPs to send warning letters to users found to be downloading, followed by cutting off their Internet access after a third offense.

The resolution passed this week, however,
Calls on the Commission and the Member States to recognise that the Internet is a vast platform for cultural expression, access to knowledge, and democratic participation in European creativity, bringing generations together through the information society; calls on the Commission and the Member States, therefore, to avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of Internet access.
The language was added to European Parliament's Report on the Cultural Industries, which supporters of the three-strikes rule in France hoped to use as a first-step in developing an EU-wide directive modeled on the French plan.

The author of the report, however, Guy Bono, had other ideas:
On this subject, I am firmly opposed to the position of some Member States, whose repressive measures are dictated by industries that have been unable to change their business model to face necessities imposed by the information society. The cut of Internet access is a disproportionate measure regarding the objectives. It is a sanction with powerful effects, which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the Internet is an imperative right for social inclusion.

The English-language video of the vote in the European Parliament on the resolution is here.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which worked with local European Net activists to oppose the French plan, has a report on the latest developments--to which this blog post is indebted--on its Deep Links blog.

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Paul Sweeting

Paul Sweeting is the Editor of Content Agenda, a business-to-business brand dedicated to the nexus of content, technology and business. This piece was originally published on Paul's blog "Media Wonk" on Content Agenda and is posted on DMW with the author's permission.

Image By jurvetson