Greetings. In a solicited filing with the new White House Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, seven entertainment industry groups including the RIAA, MPAA, SAG, and others, have asked the federal government to implement a sweeping new regime of ISP and privately-based monitoring, filtering, blocking, and reporting of presumed copyrighted materials, plus explicitly accuses search engines, ad networks, domain name registrars, proxy services, and other basic Internet infrastructure providers of being complicit in illegal activities.

Just three of the more notable bullet points:

# The federal government encourage ISPs to use, and companies to develop, monitoring, filtering, blocking, scanning and throttling technologies to combat the flow of unauthorized material online;

# Copyright holders be able to combat infringement by making a database of their works available to service providers, rather than submitting individual takedown notices. And once a work is taken down, service providers should be expected to employ "reasonable efforts" to prohibit users from uploading or even linking to them again;

# Copyright owners be able to block unauthorized streams of live broadcasts without going through the formal notice-and-takedown process

The entire document [pdf] makes for some interesting reading. I don't necessarily recommend perusing it on a full stomach, however.

Intellectual property theft is a serious problem. But attempts to remake the Internet into a preemptive automatic content blocking machine, where the concepts of users' privacy, due process, and fair use vanish into the ether, must be vigorously resisted.

--Lauren--