Paris, January 12th, 2012 – In a milestone strategy document on Internet policy, the EU Commission is getting ready to propose new repressive policies. With the upcoming consent vote on the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA and the revision of the “Intellectual Property Rights” Directive (IPRED), the controversial censorship schemes currently discussed in the United States will soon arrive in Europe.

With the EU Commission's announcement of the upcoming release of a memo regarding the signature and ratification of ACTA by the European Union, La Quadrature has sent a letter to Christine Lagarde, French Minister of Economic Affairs. The citizen advocacy group solemnly asks France not to sign this dangerous and illegitimate agreement and encourages citizens from all the negotiating countries to do the same.

Paris, May 23rd, 2011 – Tomorrow, the EU Commission will release its “intellectual property rights strategy” [Update: See the IPR strategy on the Commission's website]. Unsurprisingly, leaks show that the Commission will call for preventing copyright infringements on the Internet “at the source”, by forcing Internet companies such as hosters and access providers to obey the entertainment industries. In practice, turning these actors into a copyright police comes down to establishing a censorship regime, paving the way for dangerous breaches of fundamental rights.

As the European Commission's consultation on the revision of the anti-sharing directive (IPRED) is coming to an end, let's look at a hearing that took place in January at the European Court of Justice. At issue is the injunction pronounced by a Belgian judge forcing an Internet Access Provider (IAP) to implement broad filtering mechanisms to block all unauthorized transmissions of copyrighted works. In this case, the Commission is pushing forward a pro-copyright industry approach by calling for more repression. Such increased repression is also promoted through the upcoming revision of IPRED. It has to be stopped.

On January 26th, two members of the European Parliament1 wrote to the Commission to ask about the ongoing “Stakeholder's Dialogue on Online Copyright Infringements” organized by the EU Commission (DG Internal Market2). For more than a year, the Commission has been convening regular meetings with the copyright lobbies and Internet Service Providers (telecoms operators, hosting platforms and search engines) in order to foster “cooperation” between them. But under the guise of “cooperation”, and under the threat of legislation, the Commission and rights-holders are pressuring ISPs to become the private copyright police of the Internet.

• 1. Stavros Lambrinidis and Françoise Castex
• 2. Internal Market Directorate General, headed by Commissioner Michel Barnier, whose portfolio includes “intellectual property”

The European Commission just launched a new consultation on its disastrously dogmatic report on IPRED, a directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, adopted by the EU in 2004. The report -- whose logic is similar to ACTA -- is based on an analysis of the application of IPRED. It calls for the massive filtering of the Internet to tackle file-sharing: according to the Commission, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should "cooperate" in the war against sharing to avoid the threat of litigation.

La Quadrature du Net just sent its response to the EU Commission's consultation on the online services directive, also called the e-Commerce directive.

Download the document in PDF.

Just one day before the final deadline of the e-Commerce (or Internet directive) consultation, La Quadrature du Net publishes the draft of its response.