[ NNSquad ] Entertainment Industry Asks White House for Vast New Internet Monitoring, Filtering, and Takedown Powers

[Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>]

          Entertainment Industry Asks White House for Vast New 
          Internet Monitoring, Filtering, and Takedown Powers

             http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000699.html


Greetings.  In a solicited filing with the new White House Office of
Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, seven entertainment
industry groups including the RIAA, MPAA, SAG, and others, have asked
the federal government to implement a sweeping new regime of ISP and
privately-based monitoring, filtering, blocking, and reporting of
presumed copyrighted materials, plus explicitly accuses search
engines, ad networks, domain name registrars, proxy services, and
other basic Internet infrastructure providers of being complicit in
illegal activities.

Just three of the more notable bullet points:

# The federal government encourage ISPs to use, and companies to
  develop, monitoring, filtering, blocking, scanning and throttling
  technologies to combat the flow of unauthorized material online;

# Copyright holders be able to combat infringement by making a
  database of their works available to service providers, rather than
  submitting individual takedown notices. And once a work is taken down,
  service providers should be expected to employ "reasonable efforts" to
  prohibit users from uploading or even linking to them again;

# Copyright owners be able to block unauthorized streams of live
  broadcasts without going through the formal notice-and-takedown
  process

The entire document makes for some interesting reading.  I don't
necessarily recommend perusing it on a full stomach, however.
You can download the doc from: 

http://bit.ly/cVzcPK  (Lauren's Blog)

Intellectual property theft is a serious problem.  But attempts to
remake the Internet into a preemptive automatic content blocking
machine, where the concepts of users' privacy, due process, and fair
use vanish into the ether, must be vigorously resisted.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
   - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
   - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition 
   for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein