[Infowarrior] - IFPI wants ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, filter P2P traffic

[Richard Forno]

IFPI wants ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, filter P2P traffic
12/26 2007 | 12:01 AM
Posted by: Janko Roettgers

http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-439.html


The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) wants
European ISPs to build the copyright equivalent to the Chinese firewall, and
its counting on the help of European lawmakers to achieve this goal.

The music industry association approached the EU parliament with a set of
recommendations to "develop cooperations with ISPs", something that the
paper calls "key to the future of the music business." So what can ISPs do
to cooperate, you might ask? Well, that's easy: Just filter out any
illegitimate content, block P2P protocols and block access to websites like
The Pirate Bay. That's all.

Here's what IFPI exactly has in mind:

ISPs should use acoustic fingerprinting-based filtering solutions like the
one industry darling Audible Magic is offering to block any transfer of
unlicensed sound recordings. The IFPI paper likens this to filtered /
licensed P2P applications like iMesh and Kazaa, but it doesn't even specify
whether these filters should only affect P2P, meaning that possibly every
song transfer via IM or FTP could be affected as well.

ISPs should also block any type of Bittorrent or Gnutella traffic. From the
paper:

"It is (...) possible for ISPs to block their customers' access to specific
P2P services that are known to be predominantly infringing and that have
refused to implement steps to prevent infringement, while not affecting
regular services such as web and email."

And finally, ISPs are supposed to block "infringing websites" that are
located in "rogue jurisdictions" or "refuse to cooperate" with the industry.
One example quoted is Allofmp3.com, another one is The Pirate Bay, a site
the IFPI calls "an infamous infringing service locaded in Sweden".

The German IT news website heise.de is reporting that IFPI has succeeded in
getting some political support for these ideas. The Committee for Culture
and Education will decide in January whether they want to incorporate
recommendations for ISP-based filtering into a dossier about the future of
cultural industries in Europe.

This in itself may sound like a small step, but the EFF Europe is already up
in arms about it, calling ISP filtering "an ill-considered and damaging
quick fix."