UK Government waters down music piracy pledge

 

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Posted on 9 Jul 2009 at 13:11

A leaked memo from UK Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw states that the UK Government requires more time to reduce unlawful peer to peer file sharing by 70 per cent within three years, as was stated in the Government's Digital Britain Report.

Last July, the Government pledged to reduce file sharing by 70 per cent in two to three years as part of an agreement with internet service providers and the recording industry. The agreement included warning letters being sent out to customers deemed to have unlawfully shared files over their internet connection.

That looks to have changed now though, as the leaked memo from Bradshaw said that the timeframe of the agreement was "based on the premise" that measures to combat piracy would be "taken from July 2008 onwards."

Sadly, the measures adopted to date have been modest at best.

"A more constructive approach" would be "to take as our starting point the time at which obligations on internet service providers take effect," Bradshaw added. Effectively, that puts the Government's plans back by at least 18 months.

In November, the Government plans to release the Digital Economy Bill as a follow on from the Digital Britain Report, but it's unlikely that this will become law until 2010 at the earliest. The bill is likely to introduce the legal requirement for ISPs to send warning letters to customers whose connections are found to have been used for illegal file sharing.

In addition, the planned law will also say that if the warning letter campaign fails after six to twelve months, Ofcom, the media watchdog, will be tasked with finding more draconian sanctions. These could include internet censorship (i.e. blocking access to sites making pirated material available for all UK internet users), capping users' internet connections to make illegal file sharing almost impossible, or even filtering users' internet traffic.

Author: Tim Smalley