Broadband

The elegantly named Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform is consulting on how best to address illicit P2P file-sharing via a 3-month online consultation.

We recently covered the Memorandum of Understanding between six large ISPs, BERR and the BPI however this consultation looks beyond that to questions like “what about the other ISPs” and “what if the MOU is not succesful”.

The background to the Government interest on clamping down on copyright breaches includes the EU’s Lisbon Agenda on building a “knowledge based economy” and a recognition of the creative industries to the modern economy. As we don’t manufacture much as a country these days we need to be able to gain financial reward from the more intellectual and intangible creations, this means taking the same approach to copyright breaches as we would take to theft of tractors from a factory.

There are several references to the high cost of P2P to ISPs, which makes us wonder why we don’t have “P2P free” ISPs offering either lower prices or better services than those shouldering the burden of Captain Jack and his mates ripping off music and movies. Some ISPs traffic manage P2P heavily, for example Plusnet’s Option 1 service proclaims “It is not suitable for frequent gaming, binary USENET, Peer-to-Peer, VPN, FTP or lots of music and video downloads”, so there would appear to some merit in restricting or blocking it altogether rather than getting into the complexity of trying to determine if the files being shared are copyright or not.

Perhaps P4P or some other managed approach would be a useful compromise - “we offer P2P but only on our terms” - or deploying P2P caches or servers to carry known legitimate traffic such as OpenOffice, BBC / Channel 4, Linux Distros etc while leaving the bedroom “publishers” out in the cold.

P2P and copyright issues tend to polarise opinion, so download the consultation document and make your views known.

Tags: Channel 4, OpernOffice, P2P