Back in September, thousands of Internet users tapped their feet to the brilliant open letter on piracy, sent to Lily Allen by musician Dan Bull. As November draws to a close, Dan is back again, this time taking a swipe at everyone’s favorite twice-fired, unelected politician Lord Mandelson and his controversial Digital Economy Bill.
When Lily [...]
Britons’ love for filesharing is here to stay – and Peter Mandelson had better get used to it.
There’s a lot to hate about Peter Mandelson’s controversial Digital Economy Bill, but there’s one provision that perfectly captures the absolute, reality-denying absurdity of the whole enterprise. That titbit is the provision that holds the Bill’s most drastic [...]
The government’s pursuit of illegal filesharers has put it in conflict with ISPs and the creative industries.
“I think there’s a lot of lies being told, and this was just one of them.” That uncharitable assessment by a source who preferred to remain anonymous, of the claim by Stephen Timms, the financial secretary to the Treasury [...]
The European Parliament has approved plans to disconnect illegal file-sharers, if proven guilty.
The European Parliament has approved the controversial Telecoms Package, which means that internet users can be disconnected for illegal file-sharing if their guilt can be proved.
The new laws were scheduled to be passed months ago but had been held up by attempts [...]
Lord Mandelson seems hellbent on stifling online creativity, writes Bill Thompson on Index on Censorship.
These days history repeats itself three times, first as tragedy, then as farce and finally as an ill-considered and illiberal proposal from Lord High Executioner Mandelson, the unelected Minister for Stuff in Gordon Brown’s government.
We saw it recently when he decided, against [...]
Thousands of people have signed the Don’t Disconnect Us petition to overturn internet piracy legislation after Stephen Fry used Twitter to alert people to the perils of the proposed law.
Within 24 hours of Fry’s tweet on Sunday morning the petition, originally lodged by Andrew Heaney of broadband company TalkTalk, had passed 8,000 – more than [...]
The Digital Economy Bill, published today, is a further backward step in the efforts to reduce illegal filesharing while further threatening the rights of the consumer.
The Bill proposes that the Government can introduce new measures to punish people they think are infringing copyright without having to prove their case in court. This so-called secondary legislation [...]
The Digital Economy Bill proposals receives a welcome from the music and film industries, but angers ISPs and privacy campaigners, writes The Guardian.
The government’s planned crackdown on unlawful online filesharing has been attacked by privacy campaigners and internet service providers but welcomed by executives and artists in the music business.
Earlier today, the government published the digital [...]
The Government will order ISPs to disconnect file-sharers after receiving two warning letters.
The Government has used the Queen’s speech to confirm that it will press ahead with plans to disconnect illegal file-sharers.
The measures will be passed as part of the Digital Economy Bill, which will force ISPs to penalise persistent file-sharers.
PC Pro has the full [...]
Pirate Bay changes the system behind its the P2P network. They insist it is nothing to do with a court order.
File-sharing site The Pirate Bay has shut down its tracker technology and replaced it with a new form of peer-to-peer network. The group claimed that the move was not down to a court order but [...]
