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Government propose 75/25 split for three-strike costs
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 22 January 2010
Talking of the three-strikes anti-piracy system proposed in the UK’s Digital Economy Bill, as previously reported there remains much debate as to how much running such a system would cost, with the content owners saying £8.5 million a year, the more sensationalist of the internet service providers £500 million. But yesterday the debate wasn’t on how expensive three-strikes will be, but on who should pay for it.
According to Music Week, Timms told the Convention: “I have not been convinced by the arguments of rights holders that the internet companies should bear much of the costs [of three-strikes]. It is the rights holders who benefit. So this week, we have issued a draft statutory instrument setting out a 75-25 per cent split between rights holders – the primary beneficiaries – and internet service providers for the costs of enforcement action on copyright infringement”.
Needless to say the record companies aren’t impressed by this proposal. They say that Timms has ignored the fact that the actual monitoring of file-sharing activity isn’t included as part of the government’s three-strikes system, and that the cost of such activity will be incurred by the rights holders. Plus the ISPs also benefit from cuts in file-sharing, because file-sharers eat up more bandwidth than most other web users. Which is why they reckon the ISPs should saddle at least half of the main costs associated with three-strikes.
Look, here’s a BPI spokesman saying so: “A 50/50 share of the costs of processing notifications is the only fair way forward, particularly as ISPs freely admit they will benefit from a reduction in file-sharing traffic”.
