• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, May 12, 2008

Entertainment industry executives have floated all sorts of ideas to tackle piracy at the Internet service provider level. Some Hollywood suits have proposed that ISPs filter their networks for pirated content, while others have asked Congress to order colleges to consider filters.

In some European countries, the record industry is putting forward a plan that Internet service providers disconnect users who share content.

Net neutrality advocates and civil libertarians are rightly appalled by such proposals. Filters in themselves are no piracy solution, because people can encrypt clips so that filters don't catch them; at the same time, filters can't tell whether a clip is making fair use of copyrighted material.

And for Internet service providers to start cutting people off from outside communication without any sort of court order blatantly offends our ideas about due process, not to mention free speech principles.

Perhaps because of such concerns, entertainment executives seemed to think they had a better shot at convincing European governments to back some of these supposed piracy-busting blueprints. In France, there's a proposal on the table to create a new government agency, HADOPI, or the High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet. It's this group that would investigate French users and, in some cases, cut off people's Web service.

The French equivalent of the RIAA is pressuring the government to move forward with this scheme before the summer recess. But that timetable looks extremely unlikely, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation reports.

Additionally, the substance of the French proposal is facing pushback. Last month, the European Parliament came out against plans that involve cutting off Web users who share files for non-commercial purposes, stating that preventing such people from using the Internet would be a disproportionate response.