Digital Economy Bill
There has been considerable discussion over the Digital Economy Bill currently passing through the Committee Stage at the House of Lords. The bill is to help foster digital innovation and protect the rights of the content creators. Copyright infringement, such as the transfer of files to other people over the internet without the permission of the copyright holder is one of the issues.
TalkTalk has been one of the most vocal voices against the plan for not protecting the copyright, not because copyright shouldn’t be protected but because of the impact the plans may have. Their latest release warns that ‘Robin Hood’ developers will neuter the bill with new applications and tools. This is something that is almost inevitable – as in the digital world there is nothing like a challenge such as breaking some encryption or building an ability to hide data from others.
The Digital Economy Bill has focused on P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing technology which no doubt is responsible for a significant amount of unlawful activity, but it fails to address the key issue; namely that technical measures are unlikely to have any long term impact on the amount of illegal file sharing. Innovative programmers will develop better technology which can combined the use of encryption, proxies and distributed routing of traffic through multiple jurisdictions to make the identification of content (as perfectly legal or unlawful) as well as those engaging in unlawful copying of content an expensive, if not technically almost impossible task.
We may end up with a bill that increases costs for the music industry and service providers, which all of course filter down to consumers. It is quite possible the bill will end up being obsolete within a matter of months, or indeed we may find reports that copyright infringement has dropped, when in fact it has simply become much harder to detect.