Analysis of answers to IPRED consultation

This page aims at analysing the answers sent to the European Commission regarding the upcoming revision of the "Intellectual Property Rights" Enforcement Directive (IPRED)

Last Winter, the European Commission organized a large consultation on the future of IPRED, which is the main EU instrument in the war against the online sharing of culture. If the EU Parliament fails to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in its upcoming consent vote, the revision of IPRED will be the perfect vehicle to transpose in EU law the dangerous censorship schemes pushed by ACTA's digital chapter (visit http://lqdn.fr/en/acta to join the campaign against ACTA).

All sorts of stakeholders - be they Member States, businesses federations, corporations, lobbies, non-governmental organizations - have sent answers to the consultation (you can read La Quadrature's answer here). These submissions are listed below.

How to Help: Everybody interested in helping out can start reading a submission and identify each stakeholder's position regarding the war on sharing of cultural works online. What do they think of the EU Commission's plans to step up copyright enforcement by turning Web service providers (such as search engines hosting services) as well as telecom operators into a private copyright police?

What to look for: To quickly analyse the submissions, you should be looking for three key issues: What does a given stakeholder think about:

Liability of Internet service providers. According to existing law, Internet service providers (ISPs) are not legally responsible for the activity carried on by their users (thanks to the 2000 e-Commerce directive). These liability exemptions ensure that ISPs do not monitor their users' activity or restrict their freedom of communication. The Commission's consultation shows that it wants to bypass these liability exemptions, and enroll these actors to police their networks and services at the expense of their users' fundamental rights. Does the stakeholder show support to the liability exemptions, or does it call on ISPs to take a more proactive role in the war on sharing?
Cooperation between ISPs and copyright-holders. A growing number of policy-making efforts make references to "cooperation", "self-regulation" or "voluntary agreement", so as to turn Internet intermediaries into the gatekeepers of online communications in the war on sharing. Does the submission include such references"?
Measures to address copyright infringement, such as filtering. According to the Commission: "Internet platforms such as online market places or search engines can also play an important role in reducing the number of the infringements, in particular through *preventive measures* and ‘notice and take-down’ policies". Clearly, the Commission would also like to generalize wide-filtering schemes. Does the stakeholder criticize such dangerous scheme, or does it endorse them?

Tips: Copy-paste key excerpts of the submissions in relevant sections. Please provide a short sentence in english if the quoted text is unclear or in antother language.