Identifying piracy will be difficult with mobile broadband

One industry group has pointed out a serious flaw with the recently announced Digital Economy Bill, after claiming that identifying piracy is going to prove extremely difficult when it comes to mobile broadband users.

The Digital Economy Bill, which was recently released to a flurry of controversy, has a serious flaw when it comes to regulations about online piracy, according to one industry group. Officials from ZDNet UK have said that whilst identifying illegal file sharers from home broadband connections may be easy enough, enabling the proposed actions to be taken, the story is quite different when it comes to people that are using mobile broadband.

The broadband group stated that the unique IP address that is given to home broadband users is used in order to identify and pinpoint illegal file sharers from fixed broadband connections in the home or office, and this enables the appropriate action to be taken against those found to be engaging in piracy. However, with mobile broadband a range of users are accessing the Internet from one public IP address and this means that whilst the IP address can be identified the user cannot.

A recent report claimed that most mobile internet providers do not tend to use mapping, although it is not impossible on a small scale basis, so it will be extremely difficult to pinpoint who has been engaging in online piracy out of all of the mobile broadband users that have been using the same public IP address.

Some officials believe that the entertainment industry is not too worried about targeting mobile broadband users over online piracy at this stage, because it is not a huge problem amongst mobile broadband users. However, they have added that as more and more fixed line broadband users realise that they are under scrutiny a rising number may move their activities to mobile broadband.

Source – Think Broadband