Why you could lose your broadband connection for doing absolutely nothing wrong

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

How nice to have friends in high places. Having failed to convince Digital Britain author Lord Carter to cut off the connections of alleged illegal file sharers, the creative industry has somehow managed to convince Lord Mandelson and the new Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms, that it’s a good idea after all.

Hence today’s announcement that the Government will now urge Ofcom to suspend people’s broadband connections as a “last resort”. But on what evidence will ISPs be forced to clip your connection?

Rights holders will be required to identify the IP addresses of people they claim to have caught file sharing, and pass those details to the relevant ISP (as they do currently). But here comes the clincher. “The standard of evidence required from rights holders should, as a minimum, establish an infringement on the balance of probabilities,” the Government’s own consultation on legislation for illegal P2P file sharing states. So no innocent until proven guilty – a high likelihood that you’re in the wrong is all that the rights holders need to press the ISPs to cut off your broadband.

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File-sharing lawsuits – no evidence required

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

It may not be the file sharing or copyright infringement capital of the globe, but New Zealand is still taking the issue seriously by introducing a new law to stop people downloading movies and albums and robbing artists of honestly earned cash.

Except that the new law is such a ridiculous piece of legislation that we can’t quite believe it’s going to come into force. Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act will be introduced at the end of February 2009, and says that any individual who is even alleged to have shared files illegally can be disconnected from the internet.

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Music download death stares

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Yesterday was my worst, ever afternoon since I started working on Pro all those moons ago. As part of my roving reporter bit I was wandering around the streets of London chatting to folks about online music for the latest edition of the podcast – a task, as it turned out, which would have been made only marginally more difficult if I’d approached them with a necklace of skulls, a voodoo doll, and a blood-smeared machete.

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