PARIS (Hypebot) – Members of the European Parliament have voted on The Gallo report, a non-legislative, initiative report, which calls for harder measures against file sharers; it won.
The acceptance of this proposal could lay the foundation for future efforts to get more draconian anti-piracy measures to be implemented across Europe, such as three-strikes schemes for repeat offenders.
Christian Engstrom, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party, told TorrentFreak that support for the report serves to take fundamental rights away from citizens such as the right to a fair trial and the right to privacy.
Two of the main problems with the report, according to Glyn Moody, a renowned technology writer, are that it "conflates counterfeiting of physical goods like medicines with the copying of digital goods like music files" and "assumes that file-sharing always harms content producers." Both claims which have been widely-challenged.
La Quadrature du Net, the leading digital rights organization in Europe, had this to say about The Gallo report, "This very repressive text is one more step in the entertainment industries' crusade against their own public.”
The digital rights group argues further that Parliament has "failed to recognize that the measures called for in this non-legislative text profoundly undermine fundamental freedoms.” Such failure of this magnitude, they related to stabbing citizens’ freedoms in the back, indicating that they, “must remain on their guard and should continue to inform their elected representatives about the lies of the industry, and the importance of the Internet for the future of our societies."
To them, the report is an illustration of the will of the entertainment industry undermine citizen rights and to try to impose private copyright police on the Net.
