UK Music Wants to Filter “Illegitimate” P2P Sites

Asks UK govt for Internet disconnection of “egregious or persistent infringer” and filtering of file sharing-related websites, while ISPs such as Carphone Warehouse plan to sue the govt if forced to “impose technical measures on its customers.”

The UK govt’s consultation process on how to address illegal file-sharing concluded this past Tuesday and its final decision for legislation will be announced sometime in November.

UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has already made clear his “evolved” thinking in support for Internet disconnection after concluding that the current timetable, which stands at 2-3 yrs for a 70% reduction using a combination of notifications and technical measures, would take an “unacceptable amount of time to complete in a situation that calls for urgent action.”

A number of music artists represented by the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (Basca), and the Music Producers Guild (MPG) have all previously denounced the “three-strikes” plan as something that “will [not] work, will cost too much and is far too blunt a tool.”

However, after Lily Allen declared P2P is a “disaster” for emerging music artists the FAC convened an “urgent” P2P summit and decided that throttling was the most appropriate solution to repeat file-sharers.

UK Music, an umbrella organization that claims to represent the “collective interests,” tried to “clarify” the music industry’s position by announcing that it was firmly behind plans to disconnect file-sharers.

It also submitted a nine-page brief to the to the govt as part of the consultation process reiterating this stance.

It reads:

We support Government’s proposals which would see ISPs send notifications and apply technical measures to impede and discourage the distribution of copyrighted content via unlicensed P2P networks and encourage the use of legitimate services. As an industry, we agree that a clear distinction should be made between how technical measures are applied to the casual infringer compared to how they are applied to the egregious or persistent infringer, with temporary suspension of broadband accounts being applicable only as a last resort against the latter. Safeguards and functional definitions should be introduced to ensure that this distinction is made and maintained

UK Music even proposes that P2P and other “illegitimate” sites be filtered. It says the “development of a list stating the most egregious illegitimate sites; filtering access to such sites, which would also cover other websites, such as unlicensed one-click hosting sites, would be invaluable.”

Filtering raises a whole new pandora’s box of privacy issues. Who will devise and maintain the list? What happens when other interest groups want to ban unsavory “illegitimate” sites like we’ve seen in Australia? There what began as a “mandatory voluntary” scheme of filtering the Internet to “protect the children” from “offensive and illegal material” spiraled into a plan to include pornography, P2P, gambling websites, and even the recently disclosed online gaming sites.

As for the costs of the proposal, rather than a 50:50 split it would like for copyright holders to pay for the cost of infringement detection while ISPs pay for the cost of communicating with their customers.

Either way, by having ISPs bear a financial burden at all essentially means customers wind up paying it in the end and therefore paying to protect the outdated business models of copyright holders who refuse to adapt.

Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, owner of Talk Talk, the UK’s largest ISP, has already vowed to sue the govt if tries to implement a “guilty until proven innocent” approach and will “resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers.”

Other ISPs like BT are also refusing to punish file-sharing customers. BT’s consumer chief John Petter says enforcing the plan would cost customers £24 ($38 USD) a year and his industry as much as £1million ($1.5 million USD) per day.

It also rejects any proposal that means inspecting each customer’s traffic for signs of illegal usage.

“Many peer to peer applications are perfectly legal, such as World of Warcraft and BBC iPlayer,” said a BT Spokesman. “To investigate the exact nature of each case would involve an intrusive level of inspection of people’s traffic and customers would rightly complain.”

Exactly.

More importantly, there are hundreds of ways to circumvent any anti-P2P measures they may devise. Darknets, e-mail attachments and IMS will always prevail.

For an industry filled with some of the most creative talents around – mainly music artists that is – it’s a shame that after all this time their only solution is to filter the online communications between individuals and silence entire households vis a vis disconnection for failing to comply.

Stay tuned.

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