The British Government are planning to “ban” file sharers from using the internet.
The amendment to the Digital Britain report would see regulator Ofcom given greater powers to tackle pirates. The technical measures are likely to include suspending the net accounts of “hardcore copyright pirates”. It is believed that Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has intervened personally to beef up the policy.
Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain, explained the change of heart.
“We’ve been listening carefully to responses to the consultation this far, and it’s become clear there are widespread concerns that the plans as they stand could delay action, impacting unfairly upon rights holders,” he said.
It proposes that internet service providers (ISPs) are obliged to take action against repeat infringers and suggests that the cost of tracking down persistent pirates be shared 50:50 between ISPs and rights holders.
SPs have repeatedly argued that it is not their job to police the web. The Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) said it was “disappointed by the proposal to force ISPs to suspend users’ accounts”.
Let’s remember file-sharing is not illegal. It only becomes illegal when users are sharing content, such as music, that is protected by copyrights. As I have pointed out before in the past 95% of file downloads in 2008 were illegal. Research carried out in 16 countries by the recording industry body found that over 40bn files were illegally shared in 2008.
So is this rather insane Government of ours going to ban the majority of the population from using the internet? With more and more musicians supporting file sharing and sites like The Pirate Bay becoming more and more popular. Cannot the government just accept that they are out of touch?