UK Government Promises Not to Terminate Illegal File Sharer ISP Accounts

The Government has pledged "not [to] terminate the accounts of infringers" in its response to a small petition that called on the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to abandon Lord Mandelsons Digital Economy Bill plans to ban individuals from the Internet based on their use of "illegal" peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing via UK broadband ISPs. But all is not what it seems The petition, which is not to be confused with TalkTalk's significantly larger (33,240 signatures and counting) Dontdisconnectus one (here), won only 550 signatures but that was still enough to earn a response from the PM's office. However nobody will be surprised to learn that much of their reply supports the Digital Economy Bill, except for this bit. Political language is ambiguous and some people could easily read this as being a shift in government strategy when in actual fact it represents no change at all. They are still threatening to suspend users from the Internet, even though they can only identify the owner of the connection and not the actual infringer. In some cases even the source data can prove unreliable and has been known to target innocent users. At the very least this does give us an idea of how the government might choose to respond when TalkTalk's petition closes later this year. Of course government petitions like this rarely have any impact on policy and usually just result in the spouting of more pro-government position propaganda.


Source: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/02/22/uk-government-promises-not-to-terminate-illegal-file-sharer-isp-accounts.html