Small Internet service providers and civil libertarians have proposed forming an ad-hoc working group to resolve ongoing copyright disputes with the Software Publishers Association.
The proposal released Tuesday is an effort to ease tensions between small ISPs across the country and the powerful SPA. The SPA has argued in three lawsuits that ISPs should be held responsible for copyright infringements on their servers. ISPs maintain otherwise. The three suits were either settled or dropped.
"It was an unworkable situation," said Gene Crick, president of the Texas Internet Service Provider Association, the largest state coalition of ISPs. "We don't want to endorse the notion of stealing someone else's work, but we also should not be responsible for being Net police."
The proposal, drafted by the Voters Telecommunication Watch, calls for "mutual cooperation of ISPs and the software industry" and consensus on how to resolve cases of copyright infringement. Supporters of the proposal include, in addition to the Texas ISPA, Electronic Frontiers of Georgia, Florida, and Austin, the Seattle Community Network, and the Internet Service Providers' Consortium.
"It doesn't help users if ISPs are under constant threat of litigation," said Shabbir J. Safdar, co-founder of VTW. "Here we have an opportunity to broker a peace between the two sides."
Small ISPs are especially concerned with copyright infringement liabilities because, unlike the mammoth service providers, lawyers' fees on one copyright case can put a small ISP out of business.
The SPA, which has been given a draft of the proposal, says it's willing to work with the advocacy groups and ISP associations to find some middle ground, but has already established its own guidelines for copyright protection. The SPA argues that ISPs should have a "secondary purpose" of looking for unusual activity at a site that may point to software copyright infringement - such as high traffic, unusual directory trees, and downloading of large files.
"The only proposal right now is to talk, and we're all in favor of that," said Sandra Sellers, vice president of intellectual property education and enforcement at the SPA.
The World Intellectual Property Organization last fall broadened copyright laws to include digital transmissions of protected works, such as software. And, Congress will likely revisit the copyright-regulating issue again this session, after tentative forays into establishing guidelines last year.
The informal working group plans to meet at a "copyright enforcement summit" in the next two months to "examine hypothetical enforcement scenarios, and hopefully foster a better working relationship," the proposal states.
