Some of the biggest names in the UK’s entertainment industry will tomorrow call for the UK’s internet service providers to police their customers’ activity to stem the flood of online piracy and safeguard an estimated 800 000 jobs in the creative economy.
The call, from a unique coalition of business and union leaders, comes as Lord Carter puts the finishing touches to his final Digital Britain report, due out on June 16. As part of that process, Carter has proposed a Rights Agency, backed by media regulator Ofcom, which would bring the ISPs and media owners together to fight illegal peer-to-peer sharing of music, films and software.
But at The Future of the Creative Economy conference in London today, an alliance including the Federation Against Copyright Theft, the Publishers Association, BPI and actor’s union Equity, will call for tighter regulation, with ISPs disconnecting persistent illegal file-sharers.
“It is now time for the government to be bold and to offer full and proper protection for the music and other content-producing industries in the UK,” according to former BBC director general Lord John Birt.
Last year the government brokered a deal between the two factions which led to persistent illegal file-sharers receiving letters from their ISPs warning that they could face prosecution if they continued.
Carter’s plan for the Rights Agency includes formalising that process, through legislation, but leaving sanctions to the media owners themselves.
In a joint policy statement to be published today, however, the alliance will point out that “suggestions for rights-owners to take many thousands of legal actions seeking damages against individual file-sharers in court are neither practicable nor proportionate”.
Instead they appear to be returning to calls for a “three strikes and you’re out” system under which pirates receive “multiple educational warnings” and if they are ignored, “a graduated series of technical solutions” would be applied to “prevent further illegal activity”.
The industry estimates six million people in Britain illegally share files regularly, clocking up over a billion illegal music and almost 100 million illegal film downloads in 2007.
The ISPs, however, consistently maintained they will resist calls to become debt-collectors for the media industry.
The call comes as another central plank of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain plan will be laid down tomorrow as his lieutenant, Kip Meek, publishes his plans to restructure Britain’s airwaves to get broadband services to everyone in Britain by 2012.
He is expected to recommend caps on the amount of mobile phone spectrum that individual companies can own and call for part of the spectrum that will be freed-up by the switch off of analogue TV in 2012 to be set aside for mobile broadband provided whoever buys it agrees to near universal coverage. — Guardian News and Media 2009