Today is the last day of the Government’s consultation on its proposals to combat filesharing.
We’ve written before about this topic and our position has always been clear.
We want to see a healthy creative industries sector and we don’t condone or encourage illegal filesharing. We agree there is a problem.
But the approach proposed by Lord Mandelson in the Government’s current proposals is based on the principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ and substitutes proper judicial process for a kangaroo court.
The music industry has recently come together to support what seems, superficially, to be less draconian measures. But in fact they are merely a variation on Mandelson’s theme.
What is being proposed is wrong in principle and it won’t work in practice.
The unintended consequence of Mandelson’s plan will be to encourage more wi-fi and PC hi-jacking and expose more innocent people to being penalised wrongfully.
We have consistently said that the creative industries need to develop new models to stay in tune with technological and social trends. But we also recognise that ISPs can be part of the solution and we are currently developing a series of controls which will give parents the ability to choose different levels of access to the internet.
This will allow them to block BitTorrent (ie filesharing) sites, amongst others. Whilst it won’t stop all piracy it could help to reduce significantly the volume of files that are downloaded illegally.
More importantly, it does not violate basic human rights, nor ride roughshod over judicial process.
TalkTalk will continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers (unless directed to do so by a court or recognised tribunal).
In the event we are instructed to impose extra judicial technical measures we will refuse to do so and challenge the instruction in the courts.
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Anonymous
Algernon Cronk
Londoner