The disconnection plans set out in the Digital Economy Bill will cost consumers £500 million, according to admissions by the ministers. Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted. The Digital Economy Bill would force internet [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Siôn Simon says “People who have done nothing wrong should not be in any danger of having their internet interfered with at all”. Forthcoming laws to reduce the level of peer-to-peer copyright infringement with threats of disconnection will affect “hardly anybody, other than the most serious and egregious recidivistic offenders”, according to culture minister Sion [...]
The new EU agreement on telecoms regulation will make it almost impossible for film studios and music labels to force ISPs to disconnect customers who are suspected of illegal filesharing without first obtaining a court order. That is the view of telecoms and copyright lawyers contacted by TalkTalk, the UK’s biggest broadband provider to homes [...]
