Digital Top Stories

Digital Economy Act becomes law

By | Published on Friday 9 April 2010

It remains to be seen if the Digital Economy Act will achieve anything, but it certainly initiated a plethora of official statements yesterday afternoon.

In a flurry of activity, the House Of Lords yesterday voted through the final version of the controversial Digital Economy Bill, accepting the last minute amendments (mainly cuts) that had been made in the Commons the day before. The hypocritical Queen then tore herself away from downloading a bootleg version of ‘Kick-Ass’ via a BitTorrent site she often frequents to give the legislation a bit fat rubber stamp, making the Bill an Act.

While getting the Bill through parliament on such a tight deadline was quite an achievement for the ministers who spearheaded the legislation, and the lobbying groups who pushed them along, in many ways the difficult work has yet to begin, especially with regards the copyright section of the proposals which are of most interest to the music industry.

The Act puts in place a framework for a three-strikes system that could lead to persistent file-sharers having their net access suspended, but exactly how that system will work is still to be decided. And with opponents in the internet service provider sector, most notably Talk Talk, still so anti three-strikes, they are unlikely to assist in any smooth or rapid introduction of such a system; indeed Talk Talk are still talking about fighting any net suspension orders through the courts.

Even if the ISPs do play ball, there is still much work to be done working out how libraries, universities, community centres, hotels and internet cafes might be affected by three-strikes, and thought, therefore, needs to be given as to what measures those institutions must introduce in order to avoid liability for any file-sharing which might take place over their networks. All in all, it seems unlikely that three-strikes will go live until Spring 2011, and that the net-suspensions part of it is unlikely to begin until early 2012.

Away from three-strikes, as previously reported, the stand-alone clause in the Bill designed to give the courts the power to block access to websites that contain or link to large amounts of infringing content was dropped at the last minute in the Commons. Though a similar power, for the relevant secretary of state, was sort of included anyway through the amendment of an earlier clause. What new options that will give content owners who want to take action against organisations which enable online infringement, rather than the kids who actually file-share, remains to be seen.

Also remaining to be seen is how much pressure the incoming government puts on the record industry to adapt the way it works in return for this legislative help in enforcing copyrights. Ministers and record industry lobbyists have insisted throughout that three-strikes will be accompanied by, and will in part enable, a further expansion of the ways people can legitimately access music online.

Though, given the wide range of cheap and free legit services already available, it’s hard to see what further expansions are possible, short of a fully-licensed free-for-all P2P network or all-you-can-eat MP3 download service, neither of which are, to our mind, especially sensible places for the record industry to go.

Of course, the record industry does still have a lot of work to do to ensure the various legit digital services that are already out there can be sustained long-term, which might involve some serious rethinking of licensing models, and may ultimately require blanket licensing for digital. But that won’t necessarily result in any radical expansion of the kinds of services available as far as consumers are concerned.

Some reckon that what is really needed is a better marketing programme for the services that already do exist, most of which rely primarily on word of mouth to attract users, so none of whom undertake high profile above-the-line advertising campaigns. The industry has tried such marketing before, of course, most recently with the terrible Music Matters campaign, but it should certainly try quite a bit harder in this regard.

So, in summary, the Digital Economy Act is law, now the hard work starts.

As for the short term? Well, while getting the DEB through parliament before the Election was an achievement for those parts of the music industry that supported the Bill, having to get there via the so called wash-up has further tarnished the reputation of the music industry who, more than ever, have been portrayed as shady cash-grabbing cunts who have strong-armed and tricked weak out-of-touch politicians in order to “protect their outdated business models”.

In reality, the Bill would have almost certainly got through the House Of Commons with minimum opposition even if there had been time for full debates and scrutiny – the current government always had a sufficient majority vote in the lower house of parliament to get its own way if it wanted to. The Lords was always likely to provide tougher scrutiny, and, while rushed towards the end, the debates did take place in that chamber.

A lot of the anger outside parliament to the way the DEB became law was caused by the fact the various weaknesses of British democracy became much more obvious when the parliamentary process is played at high speed. But, nevertheless, that anger has been aimed as much at “the bloody music industry” as it has at “the bloody politicians”. Therefore, it wouldn’t surprise me if the short term impact of the Digital Economy Act is a notable increase in file-sharing, as the file-sharing community becomes more motivated than ever to “kick it to the man”.

But whatever now happens with the Digital Economy Act, file-sharing will not stop, and the music industry isn’t saved. More on that on Monday, I reckon.



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