Stop the Digital Economy Bill
Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2010 5:05 pm
(Apologies for lifting this wholesale from our local news website - ForArgyll.com - but I saw no point in me re-hashing a well-written article)
A high profile campaign has been launched with an open letter to the Government objecting to the Digital Economy Bill presently passing through parliament. This bill, sponsored by Lord Mandelsohn has hit the headlines for all sorts of reasons, not least because it seems one of its most controversial clauses has been sponsored by the BPI.
This clause, which has been somewhat watered down in its passage through the House of Lords by the Liberals, will mean that any website reported for copyright infringement can be taken down until the case has been examined in a court of law. That’s any website: we’re not just talking about YouTube.com hitting the buffers and being sent down for videos uploaded by its users (at a rate of 200 hours per second), we’re talking about your business website, we’re talking about community websites, we’re talking about this website.
Imagine the scenario if this bill gets passed into law where this website carries a story which takes a national business to task for not taking its social responsibilities to the local community seriously. Does that corporation have to engage in dialogue? Does it have to take the article seriously? Does it have to watch while the debate rages in the comments area under the article? No. All it has to do is report us to the authorities for copyright infringement. Under this law we’d be taken down. We could appeal in court of course, but as a small organisation we have no budget for that kind of thing. We would be sunk. And the irony would be that this site never uses pictures or material on which copyright hasn’t been cleared: our pictures are hosted at Flickr.com and our videos on YouTube.com.
This bill though is more pernicious that that. This bill means that the broadband connection you depend upon for your business, your social life, your shopping life, can be suspended indefinitely. Why? Well, if you are suspected of file-sharing, or if someone in your household, business, area, who has wireless access to your broadband connection uses your connection for file-sharing your provider will have an obligation under law to disconnect you.
While this clause has been tempered somewhat by the Lords, we are still looking at a situation where users are guilty before being proven innocent. Imagine the horrors that your local library, or internet cafe, or community centre will go through if a user gets caught using their connection.
If bill this comes onto the statute book before the election (in what is known as the Wash Up) it means that:
» risk averse community and charity organisations are going to simply close the doors on providing free broadband access to their communities;
» thousands of websites will become prey to malicious reports of copyright infringement;
» individuals may lose their internet connections without proper recourse, and without an assumption of innocence;
» large websites might get taken down in the UK while still operating abroad;
And it is not just the small guys who are objecting to this bill, BT, Yahoo, Talk Talk and other major service providers have all weighed in. This is not to say you should not make your views known. So what to do? This website gives you more background, and a direct link to your MP with a tool to send him an email. Use it and object to Mandelsohn’s piece of pernicious nonsense.
A high profile campaign has been launched with an open letter to the Government objecting to the Digital Economy Bill presently passing through parliament. This bill, sponsored by Lord Mandelsohn has hit the headlines for all sorts of reasons, not least because it seems one of its most controversial clauses has been sponsored by the BPI.
This clause, which has been somewhat watered down in its passage through the House of Lords by the Liberals, will mean that any website reported for copyright infringement can be taken down until the case has been examined in a court of law. That’s any website: we’re not just talking about YouTube.com hitting the buffers and being sent down for videos uploaded by its users (at a rate of 200 hours per second), we’re talking about your business website, we’re talking about community websites, we’re talking about this website.
Imagine the scenario if this bill gets passed into law where this website carries a story which takes a national business to task for not taking its social responsibilities to the local community seriously. Does that corporation have to engage in dialogue? Does it have to take the article seriously? Does it have to watch while the debate rages in the comments area under the article? No. All it has to do is report us to the authorities for copyright infringement. Under this law we’d be taken down. We could appeal in court of course, but as a small organisation we have no budget for that kind of thing. We would be sunk. And the irony would be that this site never uses pictures or material on which copyright hasn’t been cleared: our pictures are hosted at Flickr.com and our videos on YouTube.com.
This bill though is more pernicious that that. This bill means that the broadband connection you depend upon for your business, your social life, your shopping life, can be suspended indefinitely. Why? Well, if you are suspected of file-sharing, or if someone in your household, business, area, who has wireless access to your broadband connection uses your connection for file-sharing your provider will have an obligation under law to disconnect you.
While this clause has been tempered somewhat by the Lords, we are still looking at a situation where users are guilty before being proven innocent. Imagine the horrors that your local library, or internet cafe, or community centre will go through if a user gets caught using their connection.
If bill this comes onto the statute book before the election (in what is known as the Wash Up) it means that:
» risk averse community and charity organisations are going to simply close the doors on providing free broadband access to their communities;
» thousands of websites will become prey to malicious reports of copyright infringement;
» individuals may lose their internet connections without proper recourse, and without an assumption of innocence;
» large websites might get taken down in the UK while still operating abroad;
And it is not just the small guys who are objecting to this bill, BT, Yahoo, Talk Talk and other major service providers have all weighed in. This is not to say you should not make your views known. So what to do? This website gives you more background, and a direct link to your MP with a tool to send him an email. Use it and object to Mandelsohn’s piece of pernicious nonsense.
