Entertainment industry opportunism

It seems as though the entertainment industry in the EU have taken a leaf out of their US brethen's handbook. Just as the industry in the US attempted (though fortunately failed) to have a provision slipped into the PATRIOT Act in the emotional aftermath of 9/11, to enable them to hack into people's computers, the Creative and Media Business Alliance (CMBA), (i.e. Sony BMG, Disney, EMI, IFPI, Motion Picture Association, Reed Elsevier, Universal and many others) want the EU data retention proposals to be tweaked to enable the trawling of personal communications data to detect and pursue copyright infringement.

Now there is an argument to be made that the security services require access to the best available technology and people in the pursuit of serious crime and a data retention and access process, in some form, may well be a part of that. (I happen to believe the that EU data retention proposals present more problems for the police, the security services, the communications service providers and their customers than they do for the instigators of serious crime but that is another story). But as Suw Charman says here,

"Whether or not you agree with the need to retain traffic data for fighting terrorism and serious crime, there can be no benefit to national security from allowing the creative industries to use this information for prosecuting simple “infringement” cases.

Copyright Criminals

Now tie this in with IPRED2, another nasty bit of legislation which criminalises all “intellectual property” infringement on a commercial scale and “aiding and abetting such infringement”, with very thin definitions of what “commercial scale” or “intellectual property” means. The two directives together become even more alarming.

IPRED2 mandates that the police work with rightsholders to pursue suspected cases of IP infringement - including patent infringements - or merely vocal encouragement of infringement. And the Data Retention directive provides them with reams of data they can mine for evidence against these suspected infringers.

At the latest IPRED2 hearing, that’s exactly what the CBMA’s parent organisation, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), demanded.

This opens up a very ugly can of worms where entire industries can get unparalleled powers of investigation, provided at the taxpayer’s expense.

Moreover, if the CMBA get their way, the number of data retention enquiries that the telcos and ISPs will have to process will be far higher than if restricted to terrorism and serious crime. This will put far more pressure on the telcos and ISPs who will not only have to bear the cost of storing the data, but also of providing access to the information to the authorities."

Remember what I was saying about the gaffer tape and Sony CDs yesterday? You could become a copyright criminal by sticking some tape round the edge of a Sony CD in order to stop it damaging your computer. So if Sony suspect you may have tried this trick (they'll have your personal details which you had to hand over to get the software to allegedly uninstall the damaging code, the same software which did no such thing and actually caused you further security headaches), under the tweaked data retention and the IPRED2 regulations they can demand a police investigation into your activities; an investigation which would include your communications data for the previous six months (phone calls, web sites visited, emails etc.)

The spectre of the systemic effect of the combination of technology, special interests, politics and ignorance looms again.