Since mid-2010, the European Commission's department for the internal market has been in talks with a select list of companies and organisations on intellectual property rights (IPR) and their enforcement in the EU.
A leak claiming that the Commission is facilitating a stakeholder agreement – or memorandum of understanding - to reincarnate draconian copyright rules has worried MEPs, who today demanded an explanation from the EU executive.
MEPs and advocacy groups say they are angry at the secretive nature of these talks, which, they argue, will enforce contested copyright rules that were long since thrown out by the European Parliament for infringing fundamental rights.
In a nutshell, the rules could require Internet service providers (ISPs) to monitor daily Internet activity of their customers and notify them and the IPR holders of alleged copyright infringements.
"These talks, if true, could well lead to the back-door imposition of a 'Hadopi-type' regime throughout Europe, with the Commission's imprimatur, and without any prior legal scrutiny and preconditions," Socialist & Democrat MEPs Stavros Lambrinidis (Greece) and Françoise Castex (France) argue.
Hadopi is a French law introduced in 2009 which sets up an agency to monitor Internet use for illegal activity, including file sharing and downloading. The intention was to cut users off the Internet once they had broken the law three times.
Due to heated objections in the French government, today only a judge can decide whether an infringement actually took place. The Hadopi agency costs the French government 12 million euro.
An Internet advocacy group, La Quadrature du Net, highly doubts whether a judge would ever enforce the law as the evidence has been gathered by a private company and not by the police.
Leaks to a French media outlet, PC Impact, claim that the music industry has been showing off its deep packet inspection technology to the European Commission to reassure them about Internet filtering.
The undisclosed talks are allegedly between the Commission, IPR and ISP industry representatives, and have excluded civil society, EU privacy watchdogs and the European Parliament.
BEUC, a consumer organisation, reportedly pulled out of the talks last year. A spokesperson for the organisation said they had sent a letter to DG Markt's director general, Jonathan Faull, expressing "strong reservations about the content and scope" of the talks.
An ISP organisation contacted by EurActiv, EuroISPA, refused to disclose any information about talks with the Commission on intellectual property.
According to an undisclosed source, Amazon has been heavily involved in the talks.
The European Commission denied claims it had been engaged in secret meetings but said it had been involved in an open stakeholder dialogue with a balanced mix of participants.
"The Commission services facilitate an exchange of views on specific practical problems for which solutions could be found within the existing legal framework," said Chantal Hughes, a spokesperson for the Commission's internal market department.
"The dialogue takes place between the stakeholders, with DG Markt providing logistic and secretarial support, and as a neutral body, chairing the meetings," Hughes added.
