Entertainment industry trying to hijack data retention directive

I know, its a rather long title but it contains important information for everyone living in the European Union. A parliamentary committee decided to approve a plan to force communication providers (like your ISP) to retain customer data for up to one year. This plan will be voted on soon by the European Council.

Several countries including Great-Britain pushed and asked for such a plan to effectively fight terrorism. As a side note, makes me wonder how they want to do this “effectively”, but I leave that for another article on the subject.

I think its worth enough if the European Council will vote in favor for this law, but, and this is a big but, the beloved Creative and Media Business Alliance (aka Music Industry) tries to influence the European Council and the commission to allow this data to be used to investigate all crimes, not just serious offenses such as terrorism.

This would mean that “the entertainment industry would be able to pursue prosecutions against suspected copyright-infringes through the criminal court entirely at the cost of the taxpayer.”

Digital Rights Groups are fighting against this initiative:

“The data retention directive was proposed to fight terrorism. As ill-conceived as the original legislation was, this should never be used to fight the music and film industries’ battles at the expense of the taxpayer,” Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group.

It´s time something has to be done against this never satisfied industry in my opinion, and the only working method is to boycott everything that is sold by the big players in music biz.

Update: Things have not changed a lot in the past six years. Hollywood and the music industry are still pushing and lobbying hard to get new rules and laws in their favor. The most recent attempts were SOPA and PIPA in the united States.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday November 25, 2005 -
Tags:data retention, Music Industry