Broadband News

The Digital Britain report may have the aim of reducing UK online piracy by up to seventy per cent but one British ISP is having to deny it has jumped the gun and taken matters into its own hands. Be Broadband's customers have been unable to use the most popular BitTorrent websites for several hours (at time of writing the issue appears unresolved). Meanwhile, experts in the US say weaker copyright protection is actually of benefit to society - put that in your Digital pipe and smoke it.

Sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova have been out of bounds for Be users, leaving many of them fearing that the brave new world of Digital Britain was already upon them; “Why are BitTorrent websites being filtered by my ISP?! Going through a proxy proves they’re up,” complained one on Twitter. But apparently - and officially - he and the rest of the customer cohort can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

“We’re not blocking sites but trying to get to the bottom of the issue now,” said a spokesperson for Be Broadband, which is owned by O2. “On the access to torrent site issue: only certain IPs are experiencing connectivity issues to these sites. Our network team is investigating." Later, the ISP posted the following message on its forums: "There appears to be an issue affecting some of our IP ranges accessing some networks mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands regions. A lot of the torrent sites may be hosted in this region.”

While Be may not be deliberately acting against peer-to-peer sharing now, this could be a glimpse of what could come in the future. After the Digital Britain report attempted to place the responsibility for cracking down on online copyright infringement on the shoulders of the ISPs, it is possible that the fact that tracker websites are predominately hosted from relatively few "regions" could one day constitute a weakness for torenteers. Speculative it may be, but what seems like a problem now could become a policy later.

And it turns out that file-sharing might actually be a good thing anyway, according to a couple of Harvard economists. Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf are arguing that the weak copyright enforcement of today isn't discouraging creativity: despite album sales dramatically falling in the past decade, the number of albums being produced has "exploded." Quoting their working paper, File Sharing and Copyright:

In 2000, 35,516 albums were released.  Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008).  Even if file sharing were the reason that sales have fallen, the new technology does not appear to have exacted a toll on the quantity of music produced.

So not only has the amount of music being produced has increased since 2000 but, thanks to illegal file-sharing, the number of people who've been able to experience the music has also went up - hence the current lack of practicable copyright enforcement is actually for the best. In their words, it's "unambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works."

The Harvard boys note too that files-shared does not equate with lost sales and that people are more likely to go and see the bands play that they've downloaded music; the bands themselves might be making more money overall as things stand. Maybe it's a shame they didn't get their findings published a couple of days sooner.

Further details at [TorrentFreak]