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We received a petition asking:“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abandon Lord Mandelson’s plans to ban individuals from the internet based on their use of ‘peer to peer’ file sharing.”
The Digital Economy Bill, published on 20th November, sets out in detail our proposed legislation to tackle on-line copyright infringement, including unlawful peer to peer file-sharing. The Bill will implement many of the key recommendations in the Government’s Digital Britain Report (June 2009). The Report can be found at: http://www.dcms.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/5631.aspx. The details on the Bill can be found at: http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/digitalbritain/digital-economy-bill.The Bill would require ISPs to write to their customers whose accounts had been identified by a rights holder as having been used for illegal down loading of their material. In the cases of the most serious infringers, if a rights holder obtains a court order, the ISP would have to provide information so that the rights holder can take targeted court action. We hope these arrangements on their own will secure our aim of a 70% reduction in illegal peer to peer file sharing. If that proves not to be the case, the Bill provides a reserve power obliging an ISP to apply ‘technical measures’ to a customer’s internet account to restrict or prevent illegal sharing. Technical measures might be a band width restriction, a daily downloading limit or, as a last resort, temporary account suspension. A proper independent appeal would be available against application of technical measures.
We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy. The way in which cases of alleged copyright infringement are discovered involves identifying material offered to other users for download in breach of copyright, rather than any monitoring of an individual’s internet account for downloads. The process identifies the IP address of an uploader (under the legislation, making material available for copying is a breach of copyright) using publicly available information, and does not look at what an individual downloads. Under the legislation, it is the rights holders who will identify cases of alleged copyright infringement, not the ISPs. A fuller description of the proposed process to identify unlawful file-sharers was included in the 2008 consultation document.We will not terminate the accounts of infringers - it is very hard to see how this could be deemed proportionate except in the most extreme – and therefore probably criminal – cases.We added account suspension to the list of possible technical measures which might be considered if our measures to tackle unlawful file-sharing through notifications and legal action are not as successful as we hope. This is but one of a number of possible options on which we would seek advice from Ofcom – and others – if we decided to consider a third obligation on technical measures. However what is clear is that we would need a rapid and robust route of appeal available to all consumers if we decided technical measures were needed.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial. Submitted by Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk – Deadline to sign up by: 20 October 2010 – Signatures: 33,332
TalkTalk's Andrew Heaney made these comments after reading the Govt response."The Government's latest announcement on its copyright protection proposals is nothing more than semantics. It is still the case that on the say-so of record labels and film studios people will have their internet connections suspended (ie disconnected). All that the Government seems to be saying is that permanent disconnection will be reserved for the very worst offenders. But they have been saying that since day one. There is no change.This is simply spin which masks the real issue. The detection system will implicate innocent people whose connections have been hacked into. They will still be deemed 'guilty' and then have to prove their innocence. The Digital Economy Bill will give rights holders the power to act as a judge and jury, allowing them to demand that ISPs disconnect their customers without having to prove their case in a court of law. TalkTalk is the only major ISP that has said it will simply refuse to do this and will fight its case in every court in the land and in Europe if it has to.The proposed copyright protection measures are utterly futile. Determined filesharers will find other, undetectable ways to access material, leaving innocent people to bear the brunt of this oppressive legislation."
