Three researchers at Oxford University's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies conducted an interesting experiment recently. They created websites in the US and England featuring part of John Stuart Mills' famous essay "On Liberty" - the part where he discusses the dangers of censorship, in fact. Mill's text is no longer protected by copyright, having been published in the 19th century, and the websites prominently labelled the texts as "freely available throughout the web." Nevertheless, the researchers then sent emails to the ISPs hosting their websites, asserting that the websites violated Mill's copyright. In England, the ISP removed the "offending" webpages in less than a day, without verifying that the complaint was valid. In the US, the ISP waited until three complaint emails were sent and then demanded more "accurate information 'under penalty of perjury'" before any action was taken. Conclusion: the European E-Commerce Directive of 2000 "provides an incentive for ISPs to take down content without investigating the complaint... [leaving] room for easy abuse, which could amount to censorship [of perfectly legal content]." Click here to read "How 'Liberty' Disappeared from Cyberspace: The Mystery Shopper Tests Internet Content Self-Regulation" by Christian Ahlert, Chris Marsden and Chester Yung (39 pages, pdf).
So it is no surprise that the United Kingdom's ISP Association has asked the government to set "procedures governing the removal of unlawful material [and] to further clarify the rights and responsibilities of service providers... [The] Government should assist the UK Internet industry to create a universal procedure for establishing the illegality of material, and the notification of such content to ISPs by a designated authority." The need for this comes, ISPA-UK says, from the observation that "Internet users do not understand their online responsibilities. Less than one third of UK Internet users recognise that responsibility for unlawful content on the Internet lies with the person who put it there... 30 per cent of respondents identified ISPs as being responsible for the presence of unlawful content... Only 29 per cent of respondents correctly recognised the Government or judiciary as the legitimate authorities to make decisions about the legal status of online content..."