Small and mobile ISPs may avoid new filesharing laws

Regulators are considering creating loopholes in the implementation of the Digital Economy Act to allow small, mobile and Wi-Fi ISPs to avoid its copyright enforcement regime. A suggested threshold system would take into account an ISP's size and the costs of compliance before imposing the Act's provisions against unlawful filesharing. The new law allows ISPs who are not considered large carriers of copyright infringing material to be exempted, and gives Ofcom scope to define the considerations. A threshold would mean dozens of small fixed-line ISPs would be likely to avoid sending warning letters to customers on behalf of rights holders, as the extra staff required would represent a large cost to them. Many smaller outfits would also need to purchase new equipment if, as is widely expected, after a year the written warnings have not significantly cut copyright infringement by filesharers and ISPs are required to apply technical measures. These are likely to include restricting the bandwidth or protocols available to those repeatedly accused of unlawful filesharing. Similarly, mobile broadband providers would find retrieving customer details to send a warning letter request for music or film industry monitoring teams an expensive task. They typically serve all their internet users from a tiny pool of shared IP addresses and are not set up to easily discover who was responsible for a connection to a BitTorrent swarm at a particular time.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/23/ofcom_dea_meetings/