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Last week six leading ISPs, the BPI and the Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will see hundreds of thousands of warning letters sent out to alleged illegal file sharers.

Separately, a consultation document issued by the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform proposes a number of solutions for dealing with persistent offenders.

The Government's "preferred option" is a self-regulatory approach overseen by a regulator that would put an "obligation on ISPs to take action against subscribers to their network who are identified (by the rights holder) as infringing copyright through P2P."

A second proposed alternative, Option A1, suggests: "streamlining the existing process by requiring ISPs to provide personal data relating to a given IP address to rights holders on request without them needing to go to Court."

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Click here to see the full list of Government proposals for dealing with illegal file sharers

Dr Richard Clayton, treasurer of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) and technical advisor to the House of Lords inquiry into Personal Internet Security, has grave concerns over the proposals.

"The implication [of the proposals] is that, for some reason, UK law has vanished and it becomes lawful for ISPs to hand over confidential or personal data to third parties without going through some formal process," he said.

"What it [the Government] is proposing is to bring a law to do this, but I don't think it will stand up in Europe, because it hasn't thought it through properly. There's no due process. The European court will throw it out."

"When everyone's explained that to the civil servants in the department... they're going to full well understand this isn't, as proposed, a starter."

Filtering out files

Dr Clayton is also bemused by another of the Government's proposed solutions, which will require that "ISPs allow the installation of filtering equipment that will block infringing content."

"This is insane," he said. "The security, control, access, all sorts of issues raised by this... they haven't thought these things through.

"They're not experts on the industry, and they are consulting - they're not just doing it. So I suppose we should all be grateful that they're asking 'is this sane?' before they go ahead."