The academics have warned that the EU plans to modernize copyright legislation in the region may appear incompatible with its own law. The problem lies in the mandatory piracy filters that ISPs are required to use, because those breach both existing case law and human rights.

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More than a year ago, the European Commission published its proposal to update EU copyright law, which was supposed to require online services to make more effort to fight piracy now – for instance, online services were required to monitor and filter pirated content in cooperation with copyright owners.

In other words, online services processing large volumes of user-uploaded content will have to use fingerprinting or other mechanisms to block copyright infringing content. According to the Commission, the copyright holders must sign licensing agreements with services providing access to user-uploaded files. But this proposal has been heavily criticized: for example, a group of legal experts believe that, in its current form, the proposal goes against existing EU law.

First of all, the obligation to monitor the user content opposes the E-Commerce Directive, which directly prohibits general monitoring obligations for ISPs. Secondly, the filtering requirement also contradicts the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which protects freedom of expression and access to information, as well as their personal information.

The existing case law supports these provision: in the Netlog filtering case that went before the EU Court of Justice, the latter held that requiring a service provider to install broad piracy filters is illegal. However, in the proposed law, the filters will be put in place in collaboration with copyright owners, thus largely ignoring human rights. The academics point out that the court did not imply that the obligation to monitor imposed upon the ISPs would become permissible in case of creating the database of protected works in cooperation with copyright owners.

As such, the academics are making a case for a complete re-assessment of the filtering requirement, calling for the European Commission to carefully examine the new requirements and make sure that they don’t go against the existing case law and legislation.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.