Peter Mandelson wants to block your tubes

Integrity isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Lord Mandelson. He was forced to resign from the Cabinet due to scandal in 1998 and then again in 2001. It comes then, as no surprise to hear that his latest campaign against copyright infringement followed an expensive dinner with anti-file-sharing media billionaire David Geffen. Since this fateful dinner Mandelson’s stance on file-sharing has hardened, to put it lightly. The latest edition of the Digital Economy Bill was outlined in the Queen’s Speech last week. This includes:

The three strike policy

A recurring weapon in the anti-file-sharer’s arsenal, this policy would allow households to be disconnected if they are accused of copyright infringement three times. 

(The important thing to note is that this revolves around accusations of copyright infringement, there is no trial, there is no evidence; there’s simply three accusations and no more internet for you, you very bad boy.)

This bears a similarity to the widely criticised (American) Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is the piece of legislation that’s used to take down infringing videos from YouTube. It’s also been used (as there is no trial procedure) to silence critics of Scientology, remove Calvin Harris’ music video from his own YouTube channel, and attack blogs for posting criticism of badly photoshopped adverts.
This collective punishment could result in thousands of households and families being disconnected from the internet for the (unproven) actions of a few.

New powers for the Business Secretary

Lord Mandelson also wants the Business Secretary (at the moment, him) to be allowed to create secondary legislation (passed without debate in Parliament) with regards to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Such as:

• Power to create remedies for online infringements.
• Power to create procedures to ‘confer rights’ for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement.
• Power to “impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement” (this could compel ISPs to spy on their users, or allow government or business agencies to do it for them – in the name of ‘copyright protection’).

Whilst many of the powers and provisions laid out in the Digital Economy Bill are draconian and scary, these are still the ones Mandelson thinks he can get past Parliament. Who knows what new regulations he might decide to create once he’s removed that tricky democratic road bump?

Should that not be scary enough, the Guardian raises the prospect of what these powers might mean come the next election:

By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.

Given Murdoch’s recent strides against Google, he would only be too happy if a Conservative Business Secretary were to make some secondary legislation specially tailored towards News Corp.

It has been shown time and again that internet piracy cannot be stopped. Attacks on Napster led to better encryption, increased anonymity and the creation of BitTorrent. The recent case in Sweden which led to the closure of the largest torrent aggregator, the Pirate Bay, has simply caused users to turn to the multitude of other torrent aggregators to find what they want (and led to the creation of a few new ones). Nonetheless, the dying media giants have the ears of our legislators and they continue to push for stricter and more draconian measures in an attempt to kill something which cannot die.

The Digital Economy Bill will have little effect on the true pirates, they will simply up their encryption, go further underground and proliferate like mad, like they have every other time. Ironically, the biggest infringers have also been shown to be the largest consumers.

The people that will be hurt are you and me – people who live in households where everyone has a computer (or two), and all use the same internet connection. With our ISPs forced to spy on our every move how long will it take to rack up three strikes? One TV show streamed via Surfthechannel, one film downloaded via torrent, one cheeky mp3 shared via email – bye bye internet.  

If you find these proposed powers appalling, the Open Rights Group is currently running a campaign to lobby MPs to reject the Digital Economy Bill in its current format. You can find information about contacting your MP at They Work For You, and you can also sign a petition to prevent these plans.

First published Nov. 23, 2009 at LSMedia

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