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The Associated Press this afternoon quoted European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding as stating that the E.U. government should not only federalize its approach to granting safe harbor for social networks, but essentially should hold all Internet service providers on the continent, including social networks, responsible for informing Internet users when personal information is being collected from them.

The quote seemed a little fishy, so ReadWriteWeb this morning ran it past Comm. Reding's spokesperson, Matthew Newman. As it turns out, according to Newman's information, the AP quote was indeed taken out of context. Words from the misquote originally appeared in a September 10 interview with the BBC, in response to a speech by Comm. Reding from last March. In its native context, Comm. Reding does not call for a limitation on the European framework for Safe Harbor with respect to social networks - an issue for which Comm. Reding was an outspoken champion.

What keeps Internet service providers from being responsible for, and perhaps prosecuted for, the content trafficked over their networks is a provision of a law that Web advocates ironically opposed while it was being argued in 1998: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As long as ISPs do not take interest in the nature or technical breakdown of that content, then its creators and publishers can't hold them liable for intellectual property theft - this is the "safe harbor" provision.

That law isn't going away any time soon. Meanwhile, the recording and publishing industries - stymied by the ineffectiveness of prosecuting individual IP violators - know that the ISP is the one remaining place where they can attack the problem of IP theft. (Certainly they can't prosecute themselves and their own partners for ineffective security.)