Digital Britain: closing down the open internet

Digital Britain promises to ‘tackle piracy’ online. Extensive powers of blocking, filtering and reducing access to the internet will be put in place if anti-infringement letter writing campaigns are not successful.

If ‘secondary legislation’ (rubber-stamped papers to parliament) is passed, new powers would be given to Ofcom to require ISPs to restrict access of alleged infringers.

There is no suggestion of a requirement to take users to court before curtailing their access. This looks like HADOPI-lite: muzzling of users and potential harm to the internet’s infrastructure and lawful businesses, to protect failing business models in the entertainment. Regulations around enforcement will be drafted by industry and approved by the regulator, Ofcom.

We deeply regret the proposed blurring of Ofcom’s role, supposedly to protect competition and the public interest, to one of altering market access and conditions in favour of incumbent players.

Those most likely to be affected by these heavy-handed proposals are not the ‘hardcore’ infringers government alleges it wishes to target. The victims will be the innocent, naïve, and collaterally-damaged legitimate services, alongside traditional ‘consumers’ who will find the market benefits of near zero-marginal cost distribution potentially reduced by near monopoly control of a small number of rightsholders.

We will be working to produce further information on this and other parts of the Digital Britain report in the coming weeks, including opening up the BBC’s content, but for now we reproduce the basic proposals from Lord Carter, so ORG’s supporters can start a conversation.

Let’s be clear: artists need to be paid and copyright needs to function well in the digital world. But clamp downs that damage the internet’s open-ness and our human rights further undermine copyright’s reputation.

If you want to do something today, write to your MP to let them know this will rebound, either by restricting innovation and competition, or undermining copyright’s reputation. Remind them that it is our human right to have a legal process before being found guilty and punished.

Legislation to reduce unlawful peer-to-peer file-sharing

The key elements of what we are proposing to do are:

Ofcom will be placed under a duty to take steps aimed at reducing online copyright infringement. Specifically they will be required to place obligations on ISPs to require them:

• to notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights-holders) that their conduct is unlawful; and
• to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order.

Ofcom will also be given the power to specify, by Statutory Instrument, other conditions to be imposed on ISPs aimed at preventing, deterring or reducing online copyright infringement, such as:

• Blocking (Site, IP, URL);
• Protocol blocking;
• Port blocking;
• Bandwidth capping (capping the speed of a subscriber’s Internet connection and/or capping the volume of data traffic which a subscriber can access);
• Bandwidth shaping (limiting the speed of a subscriber’s access to selected protocols/services and/or capping the volume of data to selected protocols/ services); and
• Content identification and filtering.

This power would be triggered if the notification process has not been successful after a year in reducing infringement by 70% of the number of people notified.