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 service providers (ISPs) to send warning letters to anyone caught swapping copyright material illegally, and to suspend or slow the connections of those who refused to stop. ISPs say that such interference with their customers’ connections would add £25 a year to a broadband subscription.

To read the full story visit Times Online.

When Lily Allen inflamed the UK, and indeed, much of the Internet with her views on piracy a couple of months ago, it was difficult to see who could come along and create more controversy on the issue. But of course, Britain has a secret weapon – Peter Mandelson.

Lord Mandelson, or ‘Mandy’ to those speaking of him affectionately, has truly set the cat among the pigeons with his Digital Economy Bill, pleasing almost no-one apart from Big Music and Big Movies, and alienating everyone from most of the ISPs in the country through to millions of Internet users.

Torrentfreak has the full story and the video.

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 measures in reserve, only to be used if Britain’s illegal filesharing doesn’t drop off by 70% within a year of the main part of the Bill coming into force.

The idea that, at some time in the future, the volume of unauthorised copying will somehow drop off at all (let alone by an astounding 70%), is, frankly, barking. For that to happen, Britain’s general capacity for copying would have to decline faster than the increase in the British desire to make unauthorised copies.

The Guardian has the full article.

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 all evidence and in direct contradiction of the proposals in the Carter report on Digital Britain, that rights-holders or their representatives should be able to kick people accused of sharing copyright material without permission off the internet.

Then Mandelson, who owes his position in the government to the patronage of Gordon Brown rather than the mandate of the electorate, called for the ability to make up new copyright laws without having to go to the trouble of getting elected MPs to debate them. Perhaps he reckoned that operating without full democratic accountability was working so well for him that it might be useful if the music and movie industries could benefit from the same flexibility.

Read the full piece on Index on Censorship.

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 number of people who signed a petition to give Gurkhas the right to stay in the UK.

Fry claims to have introduced Lord Mandelson – whose Digital Economy Bill contains the anti-piracy measures – to the internet when he showed him his first website in 1997.

You can sign the petition against the filesharing proposals on the Number 10 website.

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 side-steps any debate, oversight or public scrutiny.

“We don’t support copyright infringement in any way but we live in the real world and understand that no amount of policing and censorship will solve the problem,” said Charles Dunstone, CEO of TalkTalk Group. “It doesn’t matter how many websites are blocked, how many services are shut down or how many individuals are pursued, people will always find ways to access copyrighted content for free.

“There is an army of ‘Robin Hoods’ out there developing tools which allow completely undetectable access to content. No amount of monitoring can spot it. Shut one service down and twenty will pop up in its place.

“As things stand, victims of Wi-Fi hijacking will be caught in the cross-hairs while the most persistent offenders will remain undetected.

“Until now the proposed legislation could be best described as unwieldy and ill-conceived. In addition it now looks to deny people freedom of speech and infringe their basic human rights. Current legislation allows for people to be taken to court and a case proved against them before action is taken and that must be maintained. ’’

TalkTalk believes that to reduce illegal filesharing, music and film fans must be encouraged back to legal services through education and by making content available in a form and at a price that people find acceptable. TalkTalk’s research shows that over 85% of people think there is not enough legal music and film content available on the Internet at a fair price.

In the meantime TalkTalk makes these pledges to its customers:

• Unless we are served with a court order we will not surrender your details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.
• We will continue to fight this draconian legislation as it makes its way through Parliament.
• If we are instructed to disconnect your account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

TalkTalk’s petition against the legislation and details of how you can make you voice heard can be accessed at www.dontdisconnect.us

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 story.

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 because the technology is out of date.

The Pirate Bay will now move to a decentralised system to allow users to find peers. Tracking will be handled using Distributed Hash Table (DHT) or Peer Exchange (PEX) nodes, and torrent files will be distributed using ‘Magnet Links’.

V3 has the full article.

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 Simon.

The Digital Economy Bill, to be announced in the Queen’s Speech next week, will mandate a regime of notifications warning against illegal filesharing, followed by restrictions on bandwidth and possible suspension of the broadband accounts of those who do not stop.

The plans have attracted claims by consumer groups and ISPs that innocent people could lose internet access, an increasingly vital service. Mistakes are inevitable given many poorly secured Wi-Fi networks and flawed infringement detection procedures, they argue.

The Register has the story.

That is the view of telecoms and copyright lawyers contacted by TalkTalk, the UK’s biggest broadband provider to homes and a consistent critic of the Government’s plans to tackle internet piracy.

Their interpretation of the new EU Telecoms rules, agreed in Brussels on Thursday, deals a serious blow to the Government’s proposed anti-filesharing measures which allow disconnection without a proper legal process.

Scott Fairbairn, a specialist in telecoms and intellectual property law at CMS Cameron McKenna, said: “The recently agreed wording in the draft EU Telecoms Package is clear. Rights holders cannot act as judge and jury in these matters.

“They cannot simply instruct ISPs to disconnect their customers or restrict their internet connections. In no way can that be considered to be a ‘fair and impartial’ procedure as article 1(3)a of the new Framework Directive demands.

“At the very least there would need to be some kind of independent and impartial tribunal to consider the merits of each case. If such an essential safeguard is not part of the UK measures then BIS would be in contravention of the new European law.”

The EU agreement states that restricting a user’s internet access may only be imposed “with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy“, and as the result of “a prior, fair and impartial procedure…”

“I am extremely concerned that much of the UK government’s proposals as they stand would be illegal,” said Paul Brisby, a leading telecoms lawyer at Towerhouse Consulting. “For the UK to impose a requirement to cut off end-users without a prior hearing would not be permissible.”

Andrew Heaney, director of strategy and regulation at TalkTalk, said: “These European rules have now put into legal language what fair-minded people instinctively knew was right and just.

“No one should be disconnected from the internet unless it is established whether they broke the law through an impartial legal process starting with a presumption of innocence. The accuser has to prove guilt and if guilt is established then any penalty must be tailored to fit the individual circumstances.

“The need for a fair process is critical because the evidence that rightsholders use can only identify the broadband connection not the individual filesharer. This means that millions of account holders are at risk of being wrongly punished due, for instance, to unauthorised wi-fi hijackers using their connections.

“Although the new rules are not yet UK law, we call on the government to respect the spirit of what is intended and to drop its draconian plans to disconnect users without a proper judicial process.”

TalkTalk’s campaign against the proposed measures – www.dontdisconnect.us – has gathered considerable momentum. To date 1,615 people have signed the campaign’s petition on the No. 10 website.