The bill is a disaster area of lack of understanding of the issues. Ordinary people risk disconnection without due process; sites could be blocked from users for legitimate users because of alleged infringing content; and research indicates that measures of this type do nothing to reduce piracy. Pirates will immediately use proxies and other anonymising methods to continue what they're doing: only ordinary people will be affected. It's quite likely that WiFi access points like those in hotels, libraries and coffee shops will close down because their owners will be responsible for any infringement. This bill will not solve any problems for the industry - in fact it'll create them. Suppose you send a rough mix to a collaborator using a file transfer system like YouSendIt. It's a music file, so it will be assumed to be an infringement. And you may not be able to access YouSendIt in the first place because access has been blocked as a result of other alleged infringements. Suppose you run an internet radio station. In the UK that requires two licenses, one from PRS (typically the Limited Online Exploitation Licence or LOEL), and the other a Webcasting licence from PPL. Part of what you pay for the PPL licence is a dubbing fee that allows you to copy commercial recordings to a common library. You might do that in "the cloud" using a service like DropBox. How will the authorities know that your music files are legally there? Do you seriously think they'll check with PPL? Of course not. It'll be seen as an infringement. Or you may have already lost access to your library because someone thinks someone else has posted infringing material to it. Worst of all, the bill is being rushed through Parliament without the debate needed to get properly to grips with the issues. The bill as it stands will threaten the growth of a co-creative digital economy. The industry badly needs to review its position. We've known since the Warners Home Taping survey in the early 1980s that the people who buy music are the people who share music. In my view a business strategy that makes your customer the enemy is not a good one. The population at large believes that a lot of the figures for illegal file transfer are conjured out of thin air - a recent press release claimed that a quarter of a million UK jobs in creative industries would be lost as a result of piracy where in fact there are only 130,000 at present. This does not look good. The industry has a history of taking the wrong position on new technology. Phonograph records would kill off sheet music sales and live performance. Airplay would stop people buying records (how wrong can you be?). And so on. The attitude to new technology seems to be "How do we stop it?" We should instead be asking "How do we use this technology to make money and serve our customers?" The industry is changing. More and more recordings are being made by individuals in small studios collaborating across the world via the Internet. Sales are increasingly in the "Long Tail" and not in the form of smash hits from the majors. Instead of the vast majority of sales being made through a small number of distribution channels controlled by half-a-dozen big record companies, they're increasingly being made via individual artists selling from their web sites and at gigs; small online record companies like Magnatune.com; and so on. It's impossible to count all those tiny micro-outlets, and they are not even recorded as sales in many cases, yet this is exactly where an increasing proportion of sales are coming from. I've seen some research from a few years ago even suggested that there was actually a continual year-on-year rise of around 7% in music sales and not a fall at all. And indeed the latest official figures show that legal downloads are more than making up for the loss of packaged media sales - and bear in mind that these numbers may increasingly ignore the vast majority of those Long Tail outlets. I don't have all the answers to what we should be doing as an industry. It's a time of change as fundamental as the introduction of the printing press. The scribes are out of a job - but the printers will do well once they get their act together. Right now we're in between the old world and the new, and everything is in flux. What I am sure of, however, is that making our customers the enemy is not the way to go. We have to find answers that use the new technology to advance our business and serve our customers, and not pretend that we can force the old ways to return, because if we do, we will all lose. The Digital Economy Bill in its current form actually *strangles* the Digital Economy - something we need to help pull us out of recession - rather than supporting it. It stems from old-age thinking and lack of understanding of the technology and its opportunities. It should not be allowed to be rushed through Parliament. Instead it needs an enlightened re-write that acknowledges what is really going on in the world and how we can make it work for us.

Whether Richard's viewpoint is correct or not - and there are some issues he has not properly represented as they are in the bill - he fails to acknowledge a very important aspect of the wider context.

The internet should not and can not be policed, censured or controlled - it is in fact a marvelous anarchy. However, the survival of such an anarchy depends on considerate and responsible behaviour from the participants.

Regrettably we are not experiencing that and what is worse the gatekeepers of the system are the worst offenders.

Unfortunately they have discovered how to make (literally) capital out of it and they don't really care how.

And why do comments on here not reflect the paragraph breaks I put in when typing all that?! ;-)

Tony - in your statement, you refer to gatekeepers. Are you referring the the ISP's?

Mick - indeed I am referring to the ISPs as Gatekeepers. I feel they are consistently failing to take proper responsibility for the effects of their business and because they wield such a lot of power both economically and politically everyone falls short of forcing them to pay more attention. They are in the best position to do something about a lot of issues including file sharing.

I don't understand why this bill is being seen as such a big deal to be honest. It just gives a rights holder a legal avenue to go down to stop their work being distributed if the rights holder wants to. Doesn't it? Maybe I've misunderstood/overlooked the finer points... If some people are happy for their stuff to be shared then nothing changes as I understand it.

Anyone interested in this debate should read this intelligent article by John Naughton in the Observer today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/11/the-networker-illegal-downloads

Mick - I am not blaming the ISPs, merely pointing out that they have the tools to help us in the situation but don't use them. Your analogy is far from the mark!

By expecting the ISPs to use those tools to control illegal file sharing, you are maintaining that they have a responsibility to use them, and by not doing so, are in effect condoning illegal file sharing, hence my use of the word "blame". Indeed, the term "gatekeeper" implies responsibility for monitoring and control. The analogy is quite succinct: the ISPs provide the technical means by which we interact on-line, and in some cases even supply the hardware (BT gives away ADSL modems). They don't create the files. It might be possible to achieve co-operation with the ISPs in order to monitor and control illegal file sharing, but to expect it as an inherent obligation is unreasonable. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I completely agree regarding the lack of appreciation or understanding on the part of the new generation of younger file sharers. A massive program of enlightenment is needed, and this is one of the ways in which the DEA is failing to deal with the problem.

I honestly don't see what the big fuss is about apart from it being a Labour/Conservative bashing exercise depending upon the colour of your credo. Wasted, tedious effort! To believe that nicking stuff and sharing it with your friends who have nicked stuff is cool is not something I condone but there we are. Of course the whole thing is tangled up with vested interests but so are most of the arguments put forward here on this page. Also, continuously bashing majors is such a stuck record, stuck record, stuck record, stuck record, stuck record, stuck record. The majors and some of the people in them, are responsible for some very good things that are happening today actually, but that is for debate elsewhere.

Here is some interesting background to the immediate effects of the bill

http://www.simkins.co.uk/ebulletins/EcsOfcomCopyrightInfringement.aspx