UK Politician Pushing For Its Own Version Of PROTECT IP

Politics

from the and-so-it-spreads dept

One thing that entertainment industry lobbyists are exceptionally skilled at is making their campaigns global. You notice it all the time. You see a particular (usually bad) law pop up in one country… and, very soon after, nearly identical legislation pops up elsewhere. The really nefarious part is that the lobbyists then use these attempts in a few countries to make it seem like there’s a “worldwide push” for such laws — even though they’re all written by the same lobbyists. Even worse, they introduce slight differences in different countries, which then allows them to make use of the most draconian laws in one place to pressure the other countries to ratchet up their own laws in the name of “harmonization” — usually under the bogus guise of a “free trade agreement.”

The latest example of this is that it appears that lobbyists have convinced some UK politicians to create their own version of PROTECT IP, which is now being run up the flagpole by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who says that Google should be liable if it doesn’t block links to pirate sites. Of course, the basic description of what he’s proposing sounds like a near perfect clone of PROTECT IP:

Hunt is expected to tell the Royal Television Society that search engines, advertisers and credit card companies should go further to ?make life more difficult? for online pirates.

According to reports, if a court deems a site to be unlawful the government wants search engines to push it down the rankings to stifle traffic and at the same time cut off advertising or payment revenues to make the site economically unviable.

That sounds almost the same as PROTECT IP, including putting the liability and compliance effort entirely on “search engines, advertisers and credit card companies”… except that in the actual bill the terms are defined much more broadly and ambiguously. In PROTECT IP, it uses “information location tools,” “internet advertising services” and “financial transaction provider” (and also domain name system server). Note that “information location tools” and “financial transaction provider” could be interpreted much more broadly than just search engines and credit card companies.

Of course, I’m curious how all the Google critics will react to this. After all, for months, they’ve been slamming the Hargreaves report for being the “Google copyright review” and insisting that the UK government is in the pocket of Google on copyright issues. Instead, it looks like, as per usual, the government is still very much under the sway of some legacy entertainment industry lobbyists.

Filed Under: protect ip, search engines, uk
Companies: google