The then-minister for intellectual property Lord Triesman said
in January that such legislation would be brought in the autumn if
ISPs and the music industry could not reach voluntary agreement. A
leak to The Times newspaper has now revealed that plans for the new
law will be made public next week.
The music industry, represented by the International Federation
of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) and the British Phonographic
Industry (BPI), has recently called for ISPs to monitor their
networks and take action against people who infringe their members'
copyright.
File sharing of music and films without making any payment
remains a growing problem and music industry sales continue to
fall. U2 manager Paul McGuinness recently accused ISPs of profiting
from the exploitation of artists' work.
The new proposal will mean that ISPs will be legally obliged to
take action against people it knows are engaging in file sharing.
The most likely recommendation, said The Times, is that ISPs will
have to monitor subscribers' internet use and give them two chances
before disconnection.
They will be emailed once, suspended a second time and then cut
off completely if they do not change their file sharing
behaviour.
An estimated six million people in the UK engaged in file
sharing last year, and could risk being cut off from the internet
under the plan.
Any solution to the problem will involve identifying who is and
who is not file sharing, a difficult technical task which some
claim is impossible.
Such action has been long-rumoured, and intellectual property
lawyer Kim Walker of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind
OUT-LAW.COM, told OUT-LAW Radio last week that ISPs faced
difficulties when contemplating a change in the law.
"The main risk is that if the ISP is trying to take
technological measures to filter and identify infringing material
then it loses its safe harbour defence," he said, referring to the
fact that ISPs are mostly not liable for users' actions as long as
they do not know about them.
"It is immediately giving itself actual knowledge that there is
infringing material up there and I think that the ISPs feel that
they are therefore opening themselves up to potential liability as
infringers," said Walker.
The move has looked increasingly likely as international
pressure has mounted. A Belgian court recently ordered ISP Scarlett
to filter its traffic to stop file sharing. France will this summer
trial a system by which ISPs will be forced to block users who are
file sharing.
BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor said that the content industry
had tried to reach agreement with ISPs, but that negotiations had
broken down.
"We simply want ISPs to advise customers if their account is
being used to distribute music illegally, and then, if the advice
is ignored, enforce their own terms and conditions about abuse of
the account," he said. "But despite some agreements in principle,
the ISPs refuse to do this on any meaningful scale."
