Moonwolf's Lair

The UK is all in a flutter over the Digital Economy Bill that’s currently going through the House Of Lords, one of the final steps before it becomes law.

On first blush, the Bill really reads like a version of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US, in many respects.  It doesn’t have a “Takedown Notice” per se, but the process for filing a claim of infringement seems similar.

OK, and … ?

Most people so far have been objecting to the disconnect provisions and the burden the Bill places on ISPs.  Enough has been said on those topics that there’s no need to go over them again here.

Here’s my problem with it.

It seems totally oriented towards file-sharing.

The entire language of the proposed new Section 124A (which covers notification of possible infringement) is between copyright holder and provider – in context, the ISP the infringer uses to get online.

Which is all well and good if the only copyright infringement that takes place online is file-sharing, and the copyright holder has the ability to determine the IP address sharing their copyrighted works.

Wait, there are more ways to infringe on copyrights?

File-sharing isn’t the only form of copyright infringement that goes on, and contrary to the apparent opinion of Ministers in the UK, music and movies aren’t the only copyrighted works in existence.

There is essentially nothing in the Digital Economy Bill that provides online copyright protection for intellectual property being infringed by users in the UK via websites.

Although some infringement of copyrighted artwork and literary works occurs via file-sharing, websites abound with stolen artwork, and even wholesale lifting and copying of literary works – but the Digital Economy Bill doesn’t have anything to address this form of theft.

For example, if I were to find someone running a website that included my artwork without permission, Section 124A won’t help me find out the address of the person who uploaded it.

The website provider wouldn’t be under any obligation to provide it – the Bill as written presumes the copyright holder has the IP address already.

And the Bill doesn’t appear to provide any means of actually forcing that infringing material to be taken down from a website.

So … ?

The only conclusion I can reach is that this section of the Bill has been put forwards as being copyright protection legislation, but it will, in effect, simply be equivalent to the music and movie industries forcing through legislation that serves only themselves – not copyright holders in general.

That’s why it’s hard for me to see this section of the Digital Economy Bill as being nothing more than a piece of FUD-driven legislation that has nothing to do with actual protection of copyrights, only something to appease the music and movie industry.

If it truly were about protecting copyrights, it would have covered more infringement methods than just those used to rip music and movies.  It would have included ways for all copyright holders to address infringement perpetrated using existing methods, as well as file-sharing.

The omission of any real mechanism to address the “If it’s on the web, it’s free for me to use” attitude in the UK, and the concentration solely on the methods of infringement used by music and movie file-sharers looks an awful lot like a smoking gun as to the real origins, motivations, and beneficiaries of this section of the Digital Economy Bill.

At the very least, I think it shows that this is a half-cocked piece of legislation that will do nothing to really promote copyright protections in the UK – At least for a large number of copyright holders.

Maybe it should have been renamed “The Music and Movie Biz Economy Bill”?

Start from scratch

It’s been said that single-issue law makes for bad law, and Section 124A seems to absolutely be single-issue law, benefitting a single-issue lobbying effort.

If Section 124A of the Digital Economy Bill is truly intended to help protect copyright holders, it should protect all copyright holders.

It needs to address all forms of infringing behaviour, and provide all copyright holders with a mechanism to resolve them.

It also needs to put in place proper stringent safeguards against abuse of the resolution process.  When the DMCA was written, it included safeguards to help reduce malicious abuses of the mechanism through legal remedies for those wrongfully accused – The language of Section 124A has no such safeguards, and promotes the usual British attitude of “Guilty, end of story, if someone says you are”.

As written, Section 124A seems atrociously unfit for its stated purpose of protecting copyrights, and needs to be taken back to the drawing board.

Or, perhaps better, the music and movie industries need to drag themselves forwards fifty years and start embracing technology instead of trying to stifle it like some modern day luddites.