Chief executive Geoff Taylor says that until ISP-level technical measures take effect a year from now as part of the Digital Economy Act it will have to “bring lawsuits at some level.”
The recent passage of the controversial Digital Economy Act in the UK has certainly pleased executives in the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), especially considering some of the original amendments were taken verbatim from a letter it wrote asking the govt for specific revisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
However, its chief executive, Geoff Taylor, says that it plans additional tactics to fight illegal file-sharing until the Act’s technical measures take effect. The technical measures – i.e. disconnection and throttling – won’t begin until the govt’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) has determined that initial efforts have failed to “to “significantly reduce” (by 70%) levels of illegal file-sharing. Warning letter won’t begin until Deecember at the earliest, so it would be some time before that determination could be made. In the meantime the BPI says it may begin a lawsuit campaign against people suspected of illegal file-sharing.
The Act requires ISPs to maintain a list of infringers and so Taylor says the BPI will simply “ask the ISPs to give us lists of anonymous numbers of subscribers who we have identified the most number of times, and we will then be able to go to court to get the identities and names of addresses of those individuals and eventually bring legal proceedings, so even at the stage of the initial letters being sent there is the possibility that we will follow up with legal proceedings against the most egregious infringers.”
What constitutes “egregious” is unclear.
The BPI last abandoned its RIAA-style “sue em all” campaign back in 2006 after determining it had little effect on illegal P2P and only alienated music fans and the public at large. It now blames the govt not allowing the technical measures to take effect immediately for its decision to return to the courtroom to solve its problems until they do.
“Government disagreed with us, regrettably, and decided not to bring the technical measures into effect immediately and has said to us that it expects us to bring legal cases and that it will take that into account when it looks at whether or not to introduce technical measures,” says Taylor. “So we may well have to bring lawsuits at some level, and that is apparently expected of us by government, it is not something we really want to do because we believe that technical measures would be a better approach. However we are not going to be given that option initially and so it is something we may have to do on some scale.”
So it would seem if people in the UK didn’t already have enough to worry about with the corporate takeover of the Internet – website filtering, ban on public access Wi-Fi – the BPI will begin suing people until the govt has the power to disconnect them from the Internet.
Talk about heavy-handed tactics.
Stay tuned.
Related Stories
- UK Govt Plans “2-Strikes” for File-Sharers Instead of 3
- EA Sport Boss Criticizes Plans to Sue File-Sharers
- Virgin Media: ‘We Have No Plans to Disconnect Illegal File-Sharers
- Major ISPs Deny Plans to Help RIAA Disconnect File-Sharers
- UK Govt Thinking “Evolves,” Will Disconnect File-Sharers After All
Hate politics but voting Lib Dem since they say they will repeal the Digital Economy Bill.
I’ll vote for anyone who deregulates the internet and makes it free again as it should be.