EU 'Net eavesdropping plan rejected

I can't stress enough how much the U.S. has to fear if it submits to a North American Union in the way Europe has to the European Union. The EU has had so many undemocratic right-wing ideas that the mind tobbles to and fro.

Not long ago, EU authorities tried looking at how to help what it calls the "cultural and creative sector." From what I can gather, the EU's original report wasn't too bad. You can tell because music and movie trade groups - Europe's equivalents of the RIAA and MPAA - howled about it until the EU obediently modified it to meet their demands.

The original draft of the EU report had a provision that was good in that it warned against criminalizing the general public in the name of fighting online piracy. But the forces of greed cried like the big babies they are and got an EU lawmaking committee to amend the report to say the exact opposite. Under the amended report, ISP's across Europe were instructed to filter users' traffic and eavesdrop for alleged copyright violations. (In the U.S., this seems to be illegal by FCC rules, but AT&T has threatened to do it anyway.)

This shows once again the dangers of letting some undemocratic supranational organization have police powers over individuals' actions that don't even cross national borders.

But there's good news: The EU has now rejected the amendments placed by the corporate movie and music lobby. That's probably more than I can say for what Congress would do - especially if some supranational power breathed down Congress's necks to kowtow to it.

(Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080122-proposed-eu-isp-filtering-and-copyright-extension-shot-down.html)