ISPs to Become Liable for the Actions of Their Users, Leaked ACTA Document Shows

The Internet as we know it may not be the same even a year from now, at least, if the current secret negotiations between the US, EU and several other countries turn out to be successful, as it looks very likely they'll be. The Internet changes all the time, it's part of its nature, mostly though, it's for the better. But once lobbying groups act on behalf of dying businesses, things start to get ugly.

There aren't that many details on the nature of the talks, their being 'secret' and all, but the more that gets out on the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA), the worst it sounds. The latest details that have gotten out confirm what many already feared, the agreement aims to make ISPs responsible for what their users do, a very dangerous precedent that serves no one except various content industries still living in the age of the CD and the DVD.

The ACTA draft leaked last week places the responsibility for policing their networks on the ISPs. Specifically, it makes them liable if they don't take measures to prevent their customers from illegally accessing copyrighted material online, the so-called 'third-party liability'. In effect, it forces ISPs to monitor and block their users to prevent copyright infringement.

Aside from the major technical difficulties involved with monitoring all web traffic, there is also the issue that it's impossible for an ISP to know which material is shared illegally and which isn't, seeing how even content owners have no idea about it, as countless situations have shown. This has most recently been the case with the whole Blogger fiasco, when several music blogs, all hosting or linking to legally licensed music, were taken down after receiving multiple DMCA takedown notices. A while back, in the famous billion-dollar YouTube - Viacom lawsuit, Viacom was unable to determine which videos were infringing and which weren't asking YouTube to take down videos its own employees had uploaded.

But even discounting all that, third-party liability is a terrible concept and implementing it by law opens up a Pandora's box. ISPs will be left open to all sorts of legal claims, not just by copyright groups, but by various other businesses or individuals that would start blaming the service providers for the 'sins' of their users.

Thankfully, there are those who see the issues with this approach and are speaking out against the secret act. "Intellectual property is important to society and must be protected [but] it should not be placed above individuals' fundamental rights to privacy and data protection," European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Peter Hustinx said, according to IDG.