Digital Economy Act taking Shape
by admin on Jun.02, 2010, under Uncategorized
I know I keep banging on about this but I really do believe this is a complete farce.
The digital economy bill has now reached it’s first draft. The proposal now states that all ISP’s with greater than 400,000 subscribers must maintain lists of percieved copyright breachers operating on a 3 strikes in a year and on you’re on the list stylee. Subscribers who have been deemed to breach copyrights on Music and Audio only seem to be the targets at the moment, possibly because taking software copyright breachers to court is a less well established process. It may well be that the music and video markets are more likely to be ‘victims’ of copyright breach but with the vast quantities of money being pushed around in all these businesses it’s hard to tell.
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/copyright-infringement/summary/
The code is scheduled to be implemented early 2011 although as yet, no details of how copyright breachers will be identified have been released. I suspect this will be a sticking point, not leastly because the investment by ISP’s to carry out the checking will be vast. This is advanced traffic sniffing being carried out on severely massive bandwidths, good luck!
What’s that? You’re inspecting my traffic? That’s illegal isn’t it? It’s a vague point but I expect someone may try and push it through a European court deliberately to test the water. I hope so.
Anyway, if you want to carry on file sharing in 2011, choose a small ISP, for the time being at least.
