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The government haven’t even decided on their next step when it comes to piracy, but ISPs are already getting worried about the new plans. Although it’s unlikely that the UK will adopt anything as harsh as the French solution, the movie industry has called for the use of technical powers that could see harsh speed drops for persistent offenders and a system of sending strongly worded warning letters to consumers is very likely.
Many ISPs aren’t so sure any of these movies will work, and Charles Dunstone, CEO of CarPhone Warehouse has been particularly vocal in voicing his concern over the idea: “If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.”
The movie industry is constantly calling for ISPs to do more against piracy, but many service providers do not see themselves as ‘internet police’ and have told the industry and the government that even if they wanted to spy on their users, they do not have the financial of technological resources to do so.
The news follows a report last week that showed that DRM, the process of protecting DVDs and music albums to stop them being copied even if you paid for a legal copy, has actually turned more people to piracy than it has prevented.
Dunstone believes that whatever new legislation is put in place will always be a step behind the industry. His assertions seemed to be backed up by recent events in Europe. Despite the creators of torrent site The Pirate Bay receiving jail time and a large fine, the site still remains available providing torrent links to millions of copyrights films, albums and games. New legislation requiring ISPs to hand over logs of activity has even resulted in new providers which do not make any logs at all, circumventing legislation.
Legislation moves slowly but piracy and its methods can change and adapt within a matter of days. Another problem for the industry and the government is that while it’s easy to spot when somebody is downloading using protocols like bittorrent, others are much harder or impossible to differentiate from normal internet communication. Indeed, it has been reported that much ‘high level’ piracy – the people that record the rip the albums in the first place – don’t use popular sites at all.
“If people want to share content they will find another way to do it,” commented Dunston, “It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive.”
Dunstone’s comments are unlikely to be welcomed by the music and movie industries but are mirrored by many ISPs across the country. Details of the exact steps the government plans to take will be announced on the Digital Britain report on June 16th.
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