UK Digital Rights Agency proposal online
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- The corporate movie and music industries have come one giant step closer to having a taxpayer-funded agency set up to look after and enforce their commercial interests and copyrights in Britain.
“Ministers intend to pass regulations on internet piracy requiring service providers to tell customers they suspect of illegally downloading films and music that they are breaking the law, says the draft report by Lord Carter,” according to a recent Financial Times story.
“It would also make them collect data on serious and repeated infringers of copyright law, which would then be made available to music companies or other rights-holders who can produce a court order for them to be handed over.”
Now, the UK government has released Copyright in a digital world, a joint ‘initiative’ by the Department for Business, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to, “provoke debate rather than represent policy,” says The Guardian.
“The government called on creators, commercial rights holders and consumer groups to submit responses.”
The Digital Rights Agency would establish a co-regulatory approach for navigating online copyright issues for film and music content, including illegal file sharing, it says.
The UK move is, “part of a carefully co-ordinated universal campaign to bring internet sales under direct corporate control with various ‘trade’ units such as the RIAA the US and BPI in Britain acting as movie and record label lobbyists and media mouthpieces,” said p2pnet, adding:
“Laughably, the measures would, ‘form the spine of a new code of conduct for the internet industry’.”
Digital Britain
Significantly, the digital Britain discussion paper addresses problems supposedly facing legacy rights holders, and those associated with them, in depth, in detail and at length, but fails to consider the most important rights of all – those belonging to ‘consumers,’ the people who make it all possible.
Says the conclusion »»»
Our vision is for the legislation proposed and the rights agency to form an integrated approach to content online, and we need to ensure that taken together they create an environment where investment in creativity online is rewarded, and deliver a practical solution to online infringement. This would provide a comprehensive framework that helps legitimate and attractive digital content to flourish while ensuring it is not fatally undermined by people taking creative products for free and without permission, either through peer-to-peer file sharing or other threats that may emerge in the future.
We have set out here a model which allows industry to keep control of how this environment is created. This model depends on the strong rights agency that can and does require specific actions of its members. We do not wish to be more prescriptive legislation – that would not be the best outcome for anyone – including rights holders. We recognize that we would run a real risk of legislating to require specific actions that may turn out in practice to be ineffective and to address only the short-term problems, without the ability to flex to deal with new situations as they arise. However, if we are not convinced that the industry is willing or able to deliver an effective rights agency we will need to think about alternative ways to approach the issue.
But the case for an effective rights agency is not about fear of something worse. There are strong reasons for both rights holders and intermediaries to engage constructively with the agency. For rights holders it is clear that others find dealing with digital rights challenging, showing investment opportunities and innovation. It is their business to market their material, online as well as in physical format, and in their interest to make it as simple as possible for others to pay them.
They also need a route and a mechanism towards protecting their rights – we do not dispute the challenge they currently face from unlawful activity. Any reliance on the legislative only solution poses great risks rights holders. However clear the Government’s commitment to tackling piracy we cannot, through legislation, provide anything like the whole answer to this complex area and the answer that we do find might prove to be short lived, even counter-productive if we are forced to be prescriptive, and that pushes infringement towards more difficult to detect methods.
For ISPs, increasingly the future will involve monetising what travels over their networks, and not just providing the networks. Digital Rights Agency could facilitate the engagement they need with content owners to help towards the partnerships and strictly commercial negotiations that will underpin them. As exploitation of copyright content brings benefits to all parties it also makes prevention of piracy a shared imperative.
Clearly, extensive discussions with content owners have already taken place, and now, almost as an afterthought, it’s the turn of others who have a mere two weeks to make their views known.
“We understand this is a very short response period,” admits the document, but, “stakeholders will appreciate the need to make rapid progress on this issue”.
It adds:
“While we will ensure that we take views from a wide range of interests, we may focus initially at first [sic] on those parties who show an interest at this stage.”
Comments should go to DBR@ipo.gov.uk
Stay tuned.
Financial Times – Internet piracy regulations planned for UK, January 16, 2009
The Guardian – Government outlines digital rights agency proposal, March 13, 2009
p2pnet – New UK government anti-P2P unit, January 16, 2009
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March 16th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
cant wait for these old farts to start dying off
March 16th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
âWhile we will ensure that we take views from a wide range of interests, we may focus initially at first [sic] on those parties who show an interest at this stage.â
Story of our lives.
Of course, by “show an interest”, they mean, “paid for it”.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Who wants to pay a £1.00 per track for low bitrate rubbish, not me.
Never mind these Nulabour twats will be gone by next june at the latest.
Hopefully Conservatives will through this idea in the bin.
March 17th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Best solution for this:
1. Anybody who has WiFi should immediately open it.
2. Infringe En masse — when it becomes clear that a significant proportion of the population is flouting this latest attempt at stupid shit, (or “shite” if you’d prefer), Enforcement will be rendered prohibitively cumbersome.
3. NO votes to the party which suggested this. NO votes to their opponents, either. Total abstention from “the franchise” on principle, because it’s not really “your” vote anyway. If lobbyists are permitted to continue to buy legislation in this manner, then “the vote” is nothing but a systematic fraud, and the only rational choice is to refrain from participating. The old cliche that “masturbating makes you go blind” is actually true on a sociopolitical level: the mass-turbation masquerading as the “political process” forfeits all legitimacy the moment lobbyists (such as, for example, the “content industry”) can buy themselves laws.
Anything useful there?
March 17th, 2009 at 4:27 am
Out of touch with reality might be an appropriate response to this “copyright industry” generated BS.
Online threat? A threat to incumbent corporate monopolies, absolutely. Doing this to protect artists? We have heard this specious argument many times, and we all know it’s for the “copyright industry” corporate types, for the artists earn their livings from live performances, as they have done for hundreds of years before “copyright”.
Trying to co-opt the ISPs by offering revenues? No surprise here. Just look at virgin media! Not to mention the invasive “Phorm” which BT wants to force upon us.
Education Programs? If you mean government sanctioned “copyright” propaganda in our schools, absolutely.
Creation of an agency which is funded by the “copyright industry”, and has special powers granted by government? Sounds like the RIAA on steroids.
Evidence of infringement provided by “copyright industries”? Guilty until proven innocent on the word of the equivalent of the Mafia, absolutely.
Oh what a fun time we live in. A time when governments around the globe placate to the every whim of the monopolistic corporations; a time of censorship and the curtailment of liberties are endemic. Forget wars, our own governments are much more frightening…
March 17th, 2009 at 5:26 am
How about all the people on this blog write to the government department who published this ‘consultation’? that would be effective.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Following on form our republishing of the Digital Britain Interim Report in a commentable form at WriteToReply.org, we’re also hosting a copy of the Digital Rights Agency steraw man proposal in a similar, commentable form: http://writetoreply.org/strawman
Each paragraph of the report can be commented upon separately, and each paragraph has a unique URI – so you you can link to appropriate parts of the proposal from your own blog posts and we can aggregate trackbacks in a convenient form.
And if you thought the Digital Britain report missed the point in any respect, why not write the report the way YOU want? http://wiki.writetoreply.org/wiki/The_Fake_Digital_Britain_Report