A Worrying Development
This bears a startling resemblence to a piece of recent euro-legislation. Compare:
The first stage of the campaign will involve hundreds of thousands of letters being sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music.
The BBC has been told that the firms have agreed to ensure their customers know it is illegal to share copyrighted music.
It is believed that the memorandum also requires net firms to go further in their attempts to tackle illegal file-sharing.
At the same time the government is also expected to start a consultation exercise that could result in laws that force net firms to tackle music piracy.
With:
The legislation would oblige ISPs to disconnect (suspected) filesharers from the internet after two warnings. It wouldn’t matter who’d done the sharing; it wouldn’t matter if it was someone else in the house; it wouldn’t matter if your machine had been assaulted by malware and used without your knowledge. It wouldn’t even matter if filesharing hadn’t taken place - note suspected filesharers.
This clearly isn’t as drastic - largely because it’s thus far just a memo. But the details are similar; an emphasis on attacking suspects, forcing ISPs to do the dirty work, a very clumsy means. That the BBC relate the BPI’s three-strikes policy in the same article worries me even more; implying, surely, it’s what, “go further,” might mean.
So - a similar move, which will receive a similar response. It’s a vague document likely to precipitate an attack on all filesharers regardless of their status, and in a fairly arbitrary fashion. Hardly what the public desires, you’d imagine, given their continued file-sharing. Perhaps the only hope to be salvaged from the article (beyond its embryonic nature) is the line suggesting net-firms will commit to developing legal file-sharing systems - the only way they’ll ever contain the activity.
Until then, though, this doesn’t look to be a very pleasant memo.
Posted in: Bad Policy, Domestic Politics, The Internet
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