Illegal downloaders should be educated not disconnected says TalkTalk

Many broadband providers are becoming increasingly concerned about the future plans for piracy, even though no decision has been made by the government regarding its next move.

With calls from the film and music industry for repeat download offenders to be sent harshly worded letters from their service provider and even have their broadband connection speeds capped, it is widely believed that whatever the UK decides to do it is doubtful that it will go as far as the French have.

The CEO of Carphone Warehouse is one of the many who have reservations about any of these steps actually working to reduce piracy. He said “If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.”

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It has been often been argued by ISPs that they are not “internet police” even in light of calls from the film industry for them to take a more active role in the prevention of piracy. ISPs have responded to these demands by saying that even if they were forced to monitor their customers they currently have neither the technological resources nor the finances to carry out such a task.

A recent report claimed that more people have resorted to illegally downloading since the introduction of DRM, which is a method used by the film and music industry to prevent what they consider to be the illegal copying of music albums and DVD even if it is a legal copy that has been bought and paid for.

It is believed that the industry will always be a step ahead of any new legislation that is implemented by the government according to Dunstone, whose claims seen to mirror the recent European events. The torrent links to many millions of albums, games and copyrighted movie are still available to users of The Pirate Bay even after its creators receiving huge fines and jail sentences. It has also been found that new ISPs that do not make logs of their users activities are able to bypass the latest legislation requiring them to provide authorities with activity logs of the customers.

Dunstone also said “If people want to share content they will find another way to do it. It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive.”

Source – www.ukcheapbroadband.com