The Digital Britain review, and the government's response to the peer to peer consultation, result in the following:
ISPs will be obliged to "tackle repeated infringement". The emphasis is on dealing with specific individuals. ISPs will be obliged to warn individual infringers when presented with evidence of infringement. So far, content owners have proven extremely bad at identifying repeat offenders, so ISPs are to be required to count the number of notices they send to their customers, which can then be provided on a court order along with the user's personal details, in order to sue serious offenders. It is believed based on experience elsewhere that these measures should reduce offending by around 70%. Ofcom, with the ISPs and content owners, will develop a Code of Practice dealing with appeals, standards of evidence, cost sharing, etc. It is strongly implied that ISPs will be required to disconnect users at some point, else why the need for appeals? In the original consultation this was also to look into technical options such as filtering, but it was generally focussed on dealing with repeat offenders; hopefully if it is part of the Code of Practice it will be targeted against known offenders, since the government has rejected any general requirement for filtering. So what this means is that the government has no intention of forcing ISPs to block peer to peer software, and the intention is to warn offenders, sue the most serious offenders, and presumably have disconnection, filtering of the offender's connection, or similar sanctions as a middle road, subject to appeals and requiring evidence. This is probably the most we could have hoped for; under French law, developing peer to peer software is illegal as well as there being arbitrary disconnections, apparently without evidence or appeal (but I have not investigated this in detail). Other interesting conclusions from the Digital Britain review: - The communications sector is roughly the same size as the creative economy. - The role of legislation is not to prop up old unsustainable business models. - They may consider taxes on blank media and/or internet connections to subsidise content creation in the near future, since these appear to have worked well in other countries. (IMHO this is a reasonable measure given the alternatives) - DRM may have a role, but needs to be flexible enough to not limit the customer's using content how they like. (IMHO this is a contradiction...) URLs: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7854494.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7858062.stm http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file49907.pdf http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file47139.pdf http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/5631.aspx
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