Just before dissolving for elections, the U.K. Parliament passed a bill that lets Internet service providers throttle or suspend service for illegal file sharers.
According to a summary of the bill on PaidContent, rights holders must report to ISPs within a month of any copyright infringement, and then the ISP has a month to notify the subscriber. The government can then direct Ofcom, a U.K. communications regulator, to order speed blocks, bandwidth shaping or account suspension for infringing subscribers. ISPs who don't comply can be fined up to 250,000 pounds.
Another clause of the bill that would force Internet service providers to block Web sites or services that infringe copyrights has been broken out into an amendment that will be voted on separately.
The law stops short of the so-called "three strikes" rules that went into effect in France earlier this year. While France's law threatens file sharers with complete disconnection from the Internet, the U.K. bill's most serious punishment is account suspension. Still, this is a major victory for movie studios and record labels.
In order to pass the Digital Economy Bill, Parliament cut down several measures but left the anti-piracy provision intact. However, the bill has already been criticized as a "bad law" due to the haste with which it was passed, PaidContent reports. Some Parliament members reportedly admitted they didn't fully understand the bill, and worried that parents or public Wi-Fi operators would become collateral damage as ISPs begin hunting down file sharers. (It's not an unheard of scenario; In the United States, a woman was falsely accused of file-sharing, and probably would have lost Internet access if she hadn't complained to the media.)
Those concerns aside, the problem with this bill is that it requires Internet service providers to perform the dirty work of copyright holders, and to share the expense of doing so. Obviously, not all ISPs are happy about this. BT, TalkTalk and Orange UK are among the bill's vocal opponents, and BT has warned that the cost of enforcement could be passed on to all customers, raising bills by up to 24 pounds per year. So even if you've never downloaded an MP3 illegally in your life, you pay for it.
