Wolf Richter

The UK government today released the long-awaited Digital Britain Report. To start with the positive aspects: The ill-devised disconnection of repeat infringers is off the table, the report recognizes that there is a demand for legal media services, which the industry currently does not serve, and there will be a digital “test bed” to experiment with new legal and commercial models.

The report keeps alive the notification scheme, which obliges ISPs to deliver warning messages to users suspected of copyright infringement and reserves the right to impose sanctions like throttling of their internet connection. The telecom regulator Ofcom has been tasked  to oversee the development of filtering and blocking technology to throttle unlicensed file-sharing traffic. These filters could be potentially even more harmful than the previous disconnection scheme. If they are not extremely fine-tuned and targeted they could reduce the p2p experience also for legal users.

Remember, not all p2p is illegal: The BBC’s iPlayer is the most vivid example of the power of p2p distribution technology and the recent announcement of BT to throttle the bandwidth available for the iPlayer would not leave me surprised if the new p2p filters would also be used to “filter” iPlayer traffic as collateral damage. The alternative looks even more frightening: A smart filter that could differentiate between licensed and unlicensed traffic would have to investigate individual content pieces, a practice called “deep-packet inspection”, which would result in a system that allowed ISPs under the overview of the government to monitor and block virtually all Internet traffic.

The report also does not address the issue that the development of new business models does not suffer from a lack of creativity, but a lack of content. To point at the recent online media services “Spotify” or “Hulu” is not sufficient, and ignores the hundreds of entrepreneurs who tried for the past 10 years to build new models for legal content monetisation, but had to give up because of the reluctance of the music industry to license their content under reasonable terms.

Finally, the “exceptional statutory maxima” for online and offline copyright infringements have been “harmonised”, a term already widely understood as meaning “increased”. £50,000 is now the new recommended maximum statutory penalty for all Intellectual-Property related offences.

After all, the report could have been worse and contains many encouraging notes. It sends a clear signal that the government is determined to foster innovation and provide Internet users with legal access to the content they want. The government will invest more than £10m in the development of the test bed for new models and support further research. But while the report is very specific on the threats against copyright infringers, it remains very cloudy when it comes to the obligations of the industry, both ISPs and content producers, to finally deliver these services.