Mandelson proposes crack down on filesharing

On Wednesday the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, announced that the government is to begin its crackdown on internet piracy. In a speech at the government’s digital creative industries conference, Lord Mandelson announced that as of April next year the government will begin issuing warning letters to illegal filesharers. He further announced that if the amount of illegal filesharing had not dropped by 70% the following year then the government will introduce legislation aimed at cutting off sharers internet access.

However as several critics have intimated that there are four major reasons why this will probably never happen and the government will have to rethink its’ strategy on controlling illegal downloads.

Taking away peoples internet is an infringement on their human rights. The internet is an extension of a person right to make an informed decision about who they want to elect under democratic law. Without relevant & truthful information, which is ever increasingly being supplied by the internet, we are not able to exercise our democratic rights.

Blocking people from the internet will cause more damage than good. The government will never actually block most people. They only want you to fear being blocked. Blocking a person from the internet not only affects them, it affects all the services they support through online consumerism. For example if you start blocking people, the ISPs start loosing business, online retail starts loosing business. This impact on the economy is far worse than file sharing, which one could even argue is having a positive effect on the economy.

It will cost too much to implement and sustain. Imagine the cost of monitoring all internet traffic. Add to that the legal fees required in prosecuting offenders. Many of you have probably heard of music companies making false claims over copyright. Who do you think this cost will be passed onto?? Yes you, the consumer. ISPs will increase fees in order to cover the costs of monitoring you.

The person infringing copyright might not be the person who is targeted and consequently banned from the net. There are hundreds of thousands of unsecured WIFI networks in this country. People can now access the internet through mobile broadband and pay as you go mobile broadband; these services however do not always require a customer to legally register a phone or mobile device. It is also fairly simple to hack wireless networks encoded with WEP and now even WAP. The ISP Talk Talk recently highlighted this issue with a well publicised stunt where they hacked into wireless networks.

All in all, any legislation brought in to remove your internet will do more damage than any issues it is claiming to solve. Even more worrying is the corporate special interests that seem to be pushing this legislation. The British Government is a government of the people for the people. NOT a government serving the special interests of the media & entertainment companies.