At the end of last week the regulator Ofcom published a draft of the code to be followed for taking action against online copyright infringement following the passage of the Digital Economy Act.
As Rory Cellan-Jones points out, some aspects of the draft code deal with concerns raised during the passage of the Act. In particular, the code only applies to ISPs with over 400,000 customers, thereby excluding operators of Wi-Fi networks such as cafes and universities who had been worried they would be forced to incur significant costs tightly policing their networks.
The code also confirms one of the concessions won by the Liberal Democrats in Parliament, namely that the power to cut off people’s internet connections will be held in reserve and not initially used. Instead, the code lays out a process of three warning letters followed by legal action by a copyright holder if they believe someone has been breaking their copyright, such as by downloading music files. The end result of the process would be prosecution of the person, but not the cutting off of their internet connection.
However, the Open Rights Group has been very critical of the proposed process, saying
There are huge unanswered questions, not least whether innocent people will have to pay to appeal. Government needs to draw a clear line between the notifications and potential disconnection regimes. Otherwise, Ofcom can’t tell people what these accusations mean, which is absurd.
You can read the draft code and find out how to respond (by 30 July) here.
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7 Comments
This is good news – congratulations are due to the Lib Dem team who negotiated these concessions.
However, history suggests that powers held in reserve do not remain in reserve for long. Those of us who oppose the draconian clause to bar offenders from the internet need to keep campaigning to have this repealed.
One small request. Although you use the correct term “online copyright infringement” in the body of the article, you use the emotional language of those who campaigned for this legislation in the headline. Can we reserve the word “piracy” for acts of aggression on the high seas? Nobody dies when a teenager downloads an episode of “America’s Next Top Model”.
The act is still unfair.
What is required is for copyright reform to happen in this country. It’s ridiculous that you are considered to have infringed copyright for ripping a CD you purchased onto your computer. This should have been dealt with when someone at the BPI finally worked out that home taping didn’t kill music!
Our copyright laws are unfair and illiberal.
As I understand it from the original plan, and this does not yet appear to have changed, the punishment process (technical measures like disconnection and speed restrictions) would be considered if piracy has not been reduced by 70% come April 2011; technical measures would then follow in July 2011. I have not seen any evidence that this plan has been scrapped and since the target of 70% is arguably unrealistic then I fully expect technical measures to surface.
The problem is, if you are one of those being wrongly accused, how do you defend yourself? Nobody seems to comprehend how the Internet works. If you are innocent and accused then there is no evidence to defend yourself with. How could a pensioner defend themselves? The appeals process cannot work.
Following on from Mark’s point above about being wrongly accused, I’m also concerned how this is going to work in terms of the sheer volume of complaints – we’re talking about tens of thousands of people each year. (Shameless plug: http://bit.ly/b4DjQC – others have come to roughly the same values) With possibly a hundred letters going out each day across all of the media companies, is anyone actually going to be listening to anyone that protests their innocence? Or will the “justice” machine simply grind on inexorably issuing (initially) fines and later (arguably better) limiting peoples access to the internet without effective oversight?
In my humble opinion the whole act should be thrown out, it is ill thought-out and just simply wouldn’t work in the real world.
The people who are downloading copyright material are technically savvy enough to get Around any attempts to identify them via proxies and VNPs
There is also a major problem with the innocent law abiding being accused, it can take just seconds to break (crack) a WEP connection and the WPA(2) connections are, although better, still have their flaws, just imagine someone sitting outside YOUR door and stealing YOUR bandwidth, downloading gods-knows -what all in YOUR name (IP address) I won’t even mention the non-secured connections that everyone has seen, there is one in my area at the moment, some poor pensioner no doubt who has little or no idea how that shiny box in the corner of the room connects to the outside world but as far as the ISP is concerned she’s downloading porn or the latest number 1 album … jeeze make me shudder just thinking about it
Oh and another thing worth thinking on, No doubt in the not to distant future most if not all government services (benefits, tax etc.) will be accessed online only that being so I’m extremely concerned that a multinational organisation would effectively be able to deny or at least threaten to deny these services to British citizens just because they believe they have lost a couple of quid
This whole act makes me laugh… Noble idea, some one will get a pay rise for it probably.
The big boys have already started using hashing algorithms in there copyrighted material. They also use VPN’s. They have absolutely no chance of catching proving anything with these people other than the fact they have high usage. The only people this will harm is the innocent and the minor offenders.