This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Jul 2011, by Mal Burns.
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08 Jul 11
Amped StatusThe White House likes the newly announced "six strikes" voluntary agreement announced today between major copyright holders and Internet access providers. That's no surprise—the US administration helped to broker the deal.
"The joining of Internet service providers and entertainment companies in a cooperative effort to combat online infringement can further this goal [of supporting jobs and exports] and we commend them for reaching this agreement," said Victoria Espinel, US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, in a statement today. "We believe it will have a significant impact on reducing online piracy."
Espinel is professionally interested in copyright online; Vice President Joe Biden is more of a copyright hobbyist ("piracy is flat, unadulterated theft") who has convened White House meetings to talk about infringement. It was therefore no real surprise to learn a few weeks ago that the White House had played a behind-the-scenes role (along with New York's Andrew Cuomo) in bringing together the content owners and ISPs to hash out a voluntary agreement." -
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What's the limit to ISP intermediaries aiding with private enforcement? That remains unclear. Both Espinel and the industries involved favor schemes to deputize intermediaries to police behavior in ways that would have been anathema to the old telephone companies. Today, ISPs will take action against subscribers based on repeated allegations of copyright infringement; tomorrow, they might be approached to help with auction fraudsters, corporate hackers, those accused of repeated libel or defamation, or child pornographers.
ISPs already do this under court order, of course, and some also take these kinds of measures voluntarily upon request (such as blocking child porn links, spammers, etc.). Today's agreement matters not because it's necessarily new—ISPs have been forwarding notices and even disconnecting customers for years—but because it marks a public, coordinated, standardized national effort to get intermediaries involved in enforcement against actions taking place on their networks.
Such intermediary enforcement isn't necessarily bad in principle—ISPs are a natural Internet choke point where pressure can be applied to the 'Net, and sometimes pressure can address crime and bad behavior (see Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith's book Who Controls the Internet? for much more on this theme).
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Mal BurnsWhite House: we "win the future" by making ISPs into copyright cops
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