The entertainment industry's efforts to impose U.S.-style DMCA copyright law on the globe (and push ISPs toward being
network content nannies) is dubbed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. As we've
previously discussed, the ACTA was constructed largely in secret in negotiations between the entertainment industry and world governments -- and early versions aimed to drastically strip safe harbor protections for ISPs, making them liable for user copyright infringement.
A new version of the agreement has leaked and has been
dissected by Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist. Geist notes that "secondary liability provisions" that would have made life in the safe harbor not so safe -- have been dropped entirely. While this latest version has been toned down from previous incarnations,
Techdirt notes still uses nebulous and vague language aimed at encouraging ISP cooperation in anti-piracy actions:
Also, as expected, the US has dropped explicit secondary liability language, but includes plenty of other vague language about anti-circumvention and "cooperative efforts within the business community," that you should be worried about. The "cooperative efforts" is code words for "ISPs should become entertainment industry cops." It's not direct secondary liability, but there's enough wiggle room there that it won't take long for the entertainment industry and its "friends" to start pointing out that ISPs that don't kick people off the internet, or don't hand over names of people, aren't making those "cooperative efforts." Just wait and see.
Of course with so many ISPs now in the content business, that cooperation was coming anyway from the largest carriers. Many ISPs are already cooperating well above their requirements by law, going so far now as to
threaten (in some instances
bluff) that they'll disconnect a user from the Internet for repeated copyright infringement.
As we
recently noted, a new company by the name of the US Copyright group is promising movie studios a new revenue stream. Using IP addresses collected by entertainment industry intelligence-gathering groups -- the company sends automated threat letters to subscribers in the hopes users will settle without a fight.
Techdirt directs our attention to the fact that the Indonesian government has ordered all ISPs in the country to block absolutely all porn on the Internet from Internet surfers. The government is threatening ISPs with closure if they don't get this done in a month, but isn't offering any real suggestions on how such a task should be accomplished, or even a list of pornography websites the government would like to see blocked. ISPs tell the
New York Times the effort would be expensive, could impair Internet performance and block legitimate websites (in fact a more recent article
suggests this has already happened), and likely would only result in only a fraction of porn being blocked anyway.
Light Reading notes how cable operators this year will seriously begin ramping up the replacement of the traditional cable modem with more sophisticated DOCSIS 3.0-capable home gateways. The gateways of course allow for faster in-home networking speeds thanks to 802.11N and Gigabit Ethernet support, but they can sometimes make technical troubleshooting easier -- and allow for the upsell to more expensive services, like a cable company's premium home network management service most of our readers don't need. The move of course is playing catch up with Verizon, who installs a wireless gateway with each FiOS install.
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