Another morning, another unworkable scheme from the outgoing Labour administration. Lord Mandleson – surely Britain’s second-favourite favourite unelected ruler – has announced that the carefully considered Digital Britain report simply wasn’t tough enough on filesharers.
And so we’re back to a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ scenario where serial downloaders have their broadband connection terminated. Or, at least, we would be back there if it weren’t for the fact that the entire plan is completely unworkable, as has be proven in France, where a similar law was struck down by the Supreme Court.
Why? Because access to information has quickly become a human right. And while I’ve no sympathy for the UK’s file-sucking freetards, I’ve also no wish to see people lose the ability to scour the web for information on, say, their elected officials. As newspapers close and TV stations become little more than re-run channels, so the internet becomes an ever-more essential part of our democracy.
There have been a number of stories in the US about parents being sued because their children downloaded files from the web without paying for them. But imagine this scenario: the parents do the downloading, and the children lose access to the wonders of the world wide web. I don’t like it.
What’s more, it’s easy to see entirely innocent people being sucked into the mire – if you have an open Wi-Fi network, your IP address could be used by any passer-by who fancies a bit of filesharing. Indeed, even if you have security it can pretty easily be hacked.
So: stop with the headline grabbing already, and let’s find a workable solution to filesharing. After all, isn’t that why the Digital Britain report was commissioned in the first place? And with services like Spotify popping up, we’re halfway there already.
See also:
Pirates don’t kill music, lawyers do
