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Digital
German minister says no to three-strikes
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 17 June 2010
Germany’s Federal Minister Of Justice, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, has said that her government will not be introducing a three-strikes system for combating internet piracy.
Ever since the French and UK governments started putting three-strikes on to the statute book, so that internet service providers may be forced to cut off or suspend the net access of persistent file-sharers, the German record industry has been lobbying their politicians for similar measures to be introduced there.
But Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, while admitting online piracy was a problem and that ISPs should be a “bit more responsible” regards any copyright infringement undertaken by their customers, said three-strikes or “bandwidth throttling” – where the bandwidth of persistent infringers would be restricted – were not under consideration. She proposed ISPs have a system whereby pop-up windows appear if it looks like a user is infringing copyright, alerting them to the law regarding downloading unlicensed works.
The German minister also called on the EU to ensure talks around the global intellectual property agreement, the previously reported ACTA, were more open. The European Union is negotiating that treaty with a stack of other countries on behalf of its member states. There was a lot of secrecy around the treaty, which has been much criticised, though to be fair the EU itself has tried to bring some transparency to the proceedings, resulting in a draft of the treaty being published.
EU reps insist that three-strikes will not be part of the ACTA, and it isn’t mentioned in the current draft, but Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger seems to still be concerned such an anti-piracy system might be forced on her country by the global agreement.
