Mandelson leads Government crackdown on filesharing

This month, the Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has put forward a series of dramatic measures designed to crack down on illegal filesharing in the UK.

The new regulations reportedly include severing the Internet connection of users found guilty of filesharing alongside proposed fines of up to £50,000.

The music business has estimated that illegal downloading is costing their creative industry approximately £180m a year, with illegal content downloaded by an estimated seven million people annually. Mandelson and his representatives in the Department for Business have denied that the implementation came following meetings with top UK record executives David Geffen and Universal Music’s Lucian Grange and point instead towards the Digital Britain report published earlier this year.

As previously reported by The Gen, the report recommended that ‘technical measures’ should be taken against repeat offenders of downloading illegal content. These included giving regulating body Ofcom the power to potentially block access to certain websites and IP addresses that facilitate file sharing alongside capping bandwidth and introducing special filters that will block the illegal downloading of copyrighted content.

Mandelson is now recommending that Ofcom and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) keep records of computers being used to regularly download illegal material. Persistent offenders would be tracked through their computer ID numbers and issued with written warnings. Those who fail to stop would have their Internet services blocked and large fines would be imposed on the worst offenders.

However, the most recent proposals were met with some criticism from within the Labour Party, with former digital enhancement minister Tom Watson stating in an Interview with the Daily Telegraph: "Not only do the sanctions ultimately risk criminalising a large proportion of UK citizens, but they also attach an unbearable burden on an emerging technology that has the power to transform society, with no guarantees at the end that our artists and our culture will get any richer."

Furthermore, The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), and the Music Producers Guild (MPG), have joined forces to oppose the proposals to reintroduce the threat of disconnection for persistent file sharers, which was in fact categorically ruled out in the Digital Britain report.

The organisations issued a collective statement, saying: "We vehemently oppose the proposals being made and suggest that the stick is now in danger of being way out of proportion to the carrot. The failure of 30,000 US lawsuits against consumers and the cessation of the pursuit of that policy should be demonstration enough that this is not a policy that any future-minded UK government should pursue."

As reported last month, American Student Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay a fine of $675,000 (£400,000) after admitting illegally sharing 30 songs online. Tenenbaum was the second person in the US to be found guilty of illegal filesharing, with a jury deciding that the 25-year-old should pay $22,500 (£13,370) per song to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), to be distributed between the record labels whose copyright had been infringed.

Have your say! Will such regulations discourage widespread filesharing? Or will they misguidedly criminalise a large proportion of UK citizens? Will this ultimately result in a financial boost for the creative industries and artists? Are such seemingly drastic measures needed to take the filesharing bull by the horns? Let us know what you think!