German music industry wants new powers

Representatives of the German music industry asked for new powers in order
to obtain, without court order, personal information about alleged
file-sharers from Internet Service Providers.

In a recent event held in Munich by the Institute of Copyright and Media
Law, representatives of the rights holder associations claimed that this
change would improve the fight against piracy, through easier civil-law
suits against the alleged copyright infringers. This new obligation should
be imposed through the new changes in the copyright law for the
implementation of the IPR enforcement directive.

Director of the German Chapter of IFPI, Peter Zombik, explained, “The EU
Directive does not require a court order for the disclosure of such
information.” He also called for an earlier implementation of the data
retention Directive, hoping that the retained data could be used in the
civil-law copyright cases. IFPI Germany is blaming the file-sharers for a
seventh consecutive annual decrease in turnover in CD sales.

On the other hand, Hannes Federrath, Professor of Information Security
Management at the University of Regensburg reminded that “What you are
demanding here goes beyond what prosecutors of consumers of child
pornography get.”

These actions of the rights holder associations are also confirming the
worries of the privacy experts that the data retained in Europe on the basis
of the new Data retention Directive will be used with a much broader scope
than initially suggested – fighting terrorism.

Holders of copyrights want to have providers hand over information without
court orders (10.04.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/71866

EDRI-gram: Data Retention Directive: reactions related to the costs
involved (18.01.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.1/dataretentioncosts

German Music Biz Hit by Pirates For Seventh Straight Year (22.03.2006)
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1941076,00.html