14 DAY TRIAL // Today the European Parliament will vote on the Telecom Packet, as the law is commonly referred to. Although the law itself is meant to regulate the European telecommunications market, the amendments to the law target online piracy; if on three separate occasions you are caught downloading or uploading copyrighted material on bit torrent trackers or any other file-sharing networks, your ISP will be forced to ban you from accessing the Internet. The amendments also target software programs and stipulate that the government is empowered to decide which programs are lawful and which are against the law.
According to EU legislators the Telecom Packet is necessary as "the current fragmentation hinders investment and is detrimental to consumers and operators." But several privacy rights organizations do not agree and argue that the law disregards privacy rights, not to mention that all Internet service providers become copyright watchdogs.
Christophe Espern, co-founder of Quadrature du Net, a rights group from France, believes that the amendments "pave the way for the monitoring and filtering of the internet by private companies, exceptional courts and Orwellian technical measures".
On the other side of the Channel, the British respond in a similar manner. BBC reports that the Open Rights Group has referred to the law and its amendments as "disproportionate and ineffective".
The FFII (short for Foundation for a Free Internet Infrastructure) is even more drastic in its affirmations and states that the legislators' involvement will not only hinder the development of the Internet, it will turn it into a Government controlled puppet; only certain ISP providers will be allowed to continue their activities and only Government selected software can be used legally.
Benjamin Henrion, representative in Brussels for the FFII, comments: "Tomorrow, popular software applications like Skype or even Firefox might be declared illegal in Europe if they are not certified by an administrative authority. This is compromising the whole open development of the internet as we know it today."
It is yet unsure whether the law will pas or not, since a similar law was rejected by the European Parliament in April this year.