Digital Britain On Copyright: Ofcom To Warn And Throttle Pirates

Digital Britain endorses a Rights Agency, passing lawbreaking customers’ details from ISPs to rightsholders, bandwidth throttling and higher fines – but stops short of introducing French-style disconnection measures or tougher legal penalties…

— The government will consult on legislation that would charge Ofcom with notifying illegal downloaders, as well as with holding data “to enable the minority of serious repeat infringers to be identified”. This could lead to “targeted court action against those responsible for the most damaging breaches of copyright”.

— The Rights Agency would be created to draft codes of conduct under which Ofcom would police this, with input from ISPs and rightsholders – effectively an invitation for the industry to create its own codes. If it can’t, Ofcom would be given “backstop powers” to author its own code.

— The government is putting faith in recent research showing a majority of freeloaders would stop after being warned – because “most people, given a reasonable choice, would much prefer not to do wrong”. But will it work? Carter wants to cut online piracy by 70 percent; the code would tell Ofcom to review the extent of any reduction after six or 12 months.

— If the review finds the target has not been met, Ofcom’s powers will extend to telling ISPs to initiate measures including blocking sites by IP or URL, blocking transfer protocols and traffic through ports, bandwidth throttling, bandwidth shaping and filtering out content. These would be used “if, and only if” the warning system doesn’t work.

So there are some new measures, hinted at in the interim report, but the industry is for now being left to get on without wide-ranging IP enforcement reform and the overriding thrust is on creating a “framework to encourage legal downloads

Comments have been disabled for this post