This past November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking in earnest at Europe's cultural products and heritage as an engine for economic growth. The idea behind this investigation, which took its original impetus from a 2006 study on "The economy of culture in Europe" and culminated in a draft report submitted by French socialist MEP Guy Bono entitled "On cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon strategy," is to consider ways that EU regulation might give a boost to the so-called "cultural and creative sector."

The draft report contained language that the caused alarm among European music and movie business trade groups, so Europe's version of Big Content immediately set about lobbying to not only "fix" the offending point (number 9, quoted below), but to convert it into a power grab by proposing alternative language supporting ISP-level copyright filtering (c.f. similar efforts in the US) and the extension of copyright terms.

Here's point 9 from the draft report; see if you can spot the language that made Europe's content industry nervous:

9. [The European Parliament] urges the Commission to rethink the critical issue of intellectual property from the cultural and economic point of view and to invite all those active in the sector to join forces and seek solutions equitable to all, in the interest of a balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property; draws Member States' attention on this point to the fact that criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution;

All that talk of striking a "balance" between access and intellectual property, and the negative reference to industry tactics that "criminalize" consumers spawned a flurry of lobbying activity, and by the time the dust settled lobbyists had succeeded in getting the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy (ITRE) to submit an amendment to the draft report urging European ISPs to implement filtering mechanisms for the purpose of copyright enforcement.

The European recording industry followed up this move with another amendment, proposed last week, to extend EU copyright terms to match those of the US (the author's life plus 70 years).

The EFF's Danny O'Brien sent a heads-up to BoingBoing that, as of today, the Culture and Education Committee rejected all of the proposed filtering and copyright extension amendments. Clearly, they're not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).