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.

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Stephen Fry has agreed to judge a competition to create a protest song, poem or other form of artistic expression against the proposed ‘Three Strikes’ law.

The law is designed to protect the music and film industry against copyright infringement but in doing so it threatens basic human rights, overturns the principle of presumed innocence and is likely only to ensnare innocent broadband customers whose Wi-Fi connections have been hijacked.

TalkTalk, the UK’s largest provider of broadband to homes, has run a vigorous campaign (www.dondisconnect.us) against the proposals, which are part of the Digital Economy Bill. The Bill has received its second reading in the House of Lords and will move to the Commons in the New Year.

More than 30,000 people have registered their opposition to the draft law by signing the petition on the No.10 website.

Now TalkTalk is offering a prize of £3,000 for the most creative piece of protest content. The competition is called Sing Our Petition but any form of artistic expression will be considered: mime, dance, song, sculpture, haiku… anything you like so long as it can be accessed online.

The competition is open to anyone via www.dontdisconnect.us/sing-our-petition and closes on 22nd January 2010.

Last month the singer Dan Bull posted a protest song on YouTube in the form of an ‘open letter’ to Lord Mandelson, the Secretary of State responsible for the legislation. This followed Bull’s hugely popular ‘letter’ to Lily Allen, an outspoken supporter of the Three Strikes law.

“Bull’s letters were inspired,” says Andrew Heaney, strategy and regulation director of TalkTalk. “Now we want to encourage others to express their opposition to the legislation. The intensity of support for our campaign has been impressive but we need to crank it up a gear or two if we are to stop these crazy measures from becoming law.”

Stephen Fry is a high profile opponent of the proposed three strikes law and has tweeted about it on several occasions. Stephen Fry says: “I’m no defender of systematic deliberate criminal downloading but in my estimation the government’s proposed ‘Three-Strike’ Copyright Protection Law is ill-conceived, constitutionally outrageous, morally unfair and epically foolish. This is not the way to protect and strengthen the creative music, film and TV industries – it is a way further to alienate and antagonise the very people on whom those industries depend.

“Aside from the skewed psychology and hilarious inappropriateness of major labels and studios leading a crusade for artistic freedom and independence, the planned legislation reveals a deep misunderstanding of the online world. Large scale criminal P2P downloaders will certainly be smart enough to avoid attention while the innocent or small-time (most of whom are good customers) will be penalised without recourse to the due process of law. I shake my head in sad disbelief that Britain could seriously be contemplating going down a path like this. I couldn’t be more pleased to be asked to judge this competition.”

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.