[pp.int.general] FRA-like EU directives to be voted on on Wednesday

[Kaj Sotala]

A reliable blog source just tipped me to worrying information about
new EU directives currently being worked on. I haven't had the time to
properly familiarize myself with the whole report and its legalese, so
I'll just provide a translation of the relevant parts of the blog post
in question before I spend several hours reading the report myself,
since this is pretty urgent. (Those who can read Finnish can find the
original at http://annamikkola.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/yksityisyyden-suoja-vs-tekijanoikeudet-eussa/
).

The worrying item in question is the (concisely named) report "on the
proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council
amending Directive 2002/22/EC on universal service and users' rights
relating to electronic communications networks, Directive 2002/58/EC
concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of
privacy in the electronic communications sector and Regulation (EC) No
2006/2004 on consumer protection cooperation."

The report is available at
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A6-2008-0318+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN
. It is on Wednesday's agenda to be voted on (
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+AGENDA+20080924+SIT+DOC+XML+V0//EN
).

The blog post (appropriately titled "privacy vs. copyright in the EU")
about the report says:

"Regulation can be misused, as has been done in Harbour's report.
Instead of starting from consumers' rights and their protection, the
starting point has been how to restrict and prevent people from doing
things. The industry (mainly the entertainment indudstry) and big
corporations lobbied the maker of the report and the parliament's
political groups towards this direction from the beginning. This is
most clear in the way that the report systematically strengthens
copyright legislation at the cost of individual rights.

As a result, the model proposed by the report gives law enforcement
rights to internet operators. EU is getting its own FRA law, as the
report authorizes eavesdropping on e-mail to protect loosely defined
"common good" or copyright infringement. Suspicion of copyright
infringement is now considered so serious, that internet service
providers are allowed to freely violate their users' secrecy of
correspondence. [...]

The report also offers ISP's filtering of websites as a method to
combat copyright infringement. [...] Again, the principle is that the
ISP can independently decide to filter websites due to copyright
reasons without any evidence at all, let alone the police or the
courts of law being involved in any way."

We urgently need a statement against this report from all European
Pirate Parties, even if the blog post does report that the chances of
the report not being approved as part of a new directive are pretty
slim.