ISP's to police piracy?
The Times leads today with news that "Internet Service Providers (ISP's) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material". The source is a leak of a . From what's been reported of the proposals this seems to be the realisation of issues raised in the interview granted to us last year by (then the minister with responsibility for intellectual property) You can listen to that interview and rebuttal here
Piracy is obviously of great concern to content creators in film, music, games and books. In film, some recent US research suggests piracy . To get an overview of the recording industry's point of view you could listen to my earlier interview with the IFPI about Pirate Bay here.
The paper reports that plans include a "three strikes and you're out" scheme of sanctions: people identified as downloading content illegally will receive a warning first, suspension of net access second and termination of connection third. How the ISP's will track illegal downloading is unclear. The Internet Service Providers Association have said that data protection laws prevent them from looking at the content of information sent over their networks. And even if you did monitor data traffic, it's a puzzle how you would differentiate a legitimate download from an illegitimate. Would podcasters, film makers and bands who wish to allow people to share their content have to include some kind of digital watermark to avoid having their listeners identified as copyright thieves? What if a podcast has ? Could a digital watermark differentiate a legitmately purchased mp3 from an illegitimately downloaded one?
Mike Butcher writing in forsees serious problems: "Trying to legislate for billions of DRM-free files flying through the Net, attempting to work out which ones have been paid for and which are 鈥渇iled-shared鈥 is a recipe for legislative chaos. For instance, what happens if a college kid wants to send his mum the MP3s his band has been working on? How does the ISP work out this is non-DRM鈥檇, non-copyrighted music? They email her a warning? She gets annoyed, cancels the ISP contract? Do Turkeys want to vote for Christmas? Will the courts be filled with crazy cases between ISPs and record companies? You bet."
Whatever the unresolved issues with this proposal it's easy to sympathise with "big budget" content creators. Five years ago I met with executives dealing with this issue at one of the big Hollywood studios. At the time bandwidth speeds meant downloading films was a minority sport, but they could clearly see the writing on the wall. How do you fund a 300million blockbuster if films are freely exchanged on-line? Years later no-one yet seems to have an answer.
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