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Government to disconnect entire families for alleged illegal downloading

Florian-leppla Florian Leppla is a Campaigner with the Open Rights Group, a non-profit company working to defend freedom of expression, privacy, innovation, consumer rights
and creativity on the net.

The Digital Economy Bill, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would give the Government the power to disconnect people from the internet if copyright files are downloaded without permission. The Government, heavily lobbied by the music industry, seems convinced that's the way to stop illicit file sharing and downloading of music. What's certain is that entire families could be be disconnected if only one member (or lodger or guest) is accused of illegal downloading.

The bill doesn't acknowledge that account holder and infringer can be different people. That's the problem. The account holder will be liable for any infringement, whether he or she has infringed or not. That means that a whole family is punished because of the action of one person. This person can be anyone using their internet: a family member, a guest visiting, a lodger or a neighbour using their open wifi.

A lot of people need the internet for work or depend on if for their eduction. The Government has encouraged that and has pledged to connect citizens to the web, not disconnect them.

Gordon Brown said last year that "the internet is as vital as water and gas". Would he then consider cutting off people's water supply if their kids had shoplifted?

Disconnection is collective punishment. It is unacceptable. It is unfair and it is disproportionate.

What can you do?

1) Ask your MP to help remove the disconnection from the bill. Contact your MP now!

2) Write to your local paper and let people know that disconnection is wrong.

3) Sign up with the Open Rights Group to support our work.

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Alex Deane Posted in Guest Posts, Mastering the Internet
  • guy herbert

    HMRC is now *requiring* small businesses to make returns online. HMG is desperate to put more public services online. Quite how this is supposed to fit with arbitrary disconnection is unclear.
    There are other things in the bill that are even madder. The controls it would place on public wifi would effectively make it impossible to use for most normal purposes (including a locking out a large number of recent DRM and copy-protection systems, stopping operating system and virus protection updates, potentially stopping people from buying things online securely, etc). Completely nuts, in a bill that is trumpetted as being to “to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters and to further the interests of consumers in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition”.

  • http://alastairs-place.net alastair

    There is *nothing* wrong with the proposals.
    The fact is that nobody will be without access to the Internet as a result of disconnection. They will simply be without convenient, private access from their own home, and only then if they ignore the warnings to stop illegally up/downloading content to which they have no right.
    On disconnection, to access the Internet, they will have to go to the public library or to an Internet Café or Starbucks or similar, which is hardly the end of the world.

  • http://www.openrightsgroup.org Florian

    That is, Alastair, if Open Wifi will exist in future (see Guy’s comment above). The library or cafe would be liable for the infringement and they may well decide that offering wifi is not worth the hassle.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/jim28 Jim

    Is it really ok to cut a child off from the internet at home, in the middle of their exams, and force them into internet cafés because someone else has infringed copyright? Or to make searching for jobs really difficult for someone unemployed when they have done nothing wrong?
    Even someone who has infringed deserves a fine rather than disconnection. Civil crime punishments are almost always fines.

  • Purlieu

    “What’s certain is that entire families could be be disconnected if only one member (or lodger or guest) is accused of illegal downloading”
    That’s ACCUSED
    By a corporate
    Well done Mandleson thanks a lot

  • Miles

    What makes this law ridiculous is the fact that a teenager sharing a couple of songs with his friends – hardly the crime of the century – will be treated more harshly than paedophiles sharing indecent images.

  • http://alastairs-place.net alastair

    Miles, that’s simply not true. People sharing indecent images of children are subject to arrest and criminal prosecution, followed by extended periods of detention and registration as a sex offender.
    Purlieu, the copyright holder (who is not necessarily “a corporate”; there are plenty of *individual* copyright holders, and even in the case of “corporates”, most of them are small, maybe one to five employees, *not* the huge mega-corps that you’re thinking of) will have to provide some evidence. People don’t just get arbitrarily disconnected on their say-so, *and* there are warning letters first.
    Jim: children have Internet access at school, never mind Internet cafés and libraries. And the jobless have JobCentre Plus or whatever it’s called today. As for the point about a fine, the problem with that is that ISPs don’t want to give up their customers’ details, and it’s actually very expensive going to court for this type of infringement (prohibitively so, even for the big mega-corps Purlieu was thinking of), which is the only way that you’re going to get the name and address to even write a letter *threatening* legal action. The proposals are an attempt at a compromise, the idea being that copyright holders can notify ISPs of infringement (providing some evidence), and the ISP can then send a warning letter. Disconnection is very much a last resort and if you read the proposals you’ll discover that it’s actually pretty difficult to get to that stage unless there really is unrepentant infringement going on.
    I’ll also add, as a small copyright holder myself, that this really is a *huge* problem on the Internet. It’s very important to understand that the majority of copyright holders are *individuals* and *small* companies; illegal downloading hurts these people disproportionately, much more than it hurts e.g. Microsoft (who frankly benefit from consumer piracy because it increases their lock-in in the business market which is where they make their money).
    To my mind, a much more useful thing to do would be to make it illegal to run a piracy “board”, which is where all the software cracks originate. There is no purpose for those sites other than infringement, but it’s legally very difficult to touch them right now. Similarly for movies and music, it seems clear that places like The Pirate Bay should be outlawed – regardless of the tiny amount of legitimate use, the overwhelming use of such sites is for infringement.

  • Miles

    Alistair, my comparison was based on information from this blog:
    http://www.dontdisconnect.us/talktalk-responds-to-bonos-filesharing-outrage/
    Quote: “Incredibly, if the Digital Economy Bill as it is currently framed becomes law, it will become legal to summarily disconnect someone for alleged copyright abuse but if you want to disconnect them for accessing child abuse images then you will have to get a court order first.”