The UK’s House of Lords this week meekly passed the internet piracy bill which will echo failed French legislation, which allows illegal file sharers to eventually be cut off from the internet. Next stop it goes under the name of the Digital Economy Bill to the House of Commons to be passed, the government hopes, before there is an election in the country.
This is a piece of legislation invented by the music industry to save a dying business model, which will cause a huge amount of harm to individuals and which will fail abysmally to save record companies.
Once passed, when you find out that little Johnny has been downloading naughty illegal music files on the home computer, families will be shocked to find that their internet line gets throttled back or cut off, and daddy can no longer work at home, or do any banking or pay the bills online or read his email, or even buy music on iTunes for that matter.
The legislation is all very well if everyone who uses it applies a bit of common sense, but we expect hysterical cries from the music industry to cut thousands of people off, followed by the tabloid newspapers running headlines of how this of that person’s life was ruined by being denied the internet.
Virtually everyone who has spoken publicly on the subject says it is a piece of idiocy, put forward by business secretary Peter Mandelson, an unelected, deeply unpopular and seemingly constant advisor to the Labour government (he has been thrown out at least twice for things at least as dishonest as file sharing). This is a clear case of a law which will outlast the people it was written to protect and within a few years we will look at it on our statute books and wonder what on earth it is for. ‘It’s to protect record companies,’ we will tell our children. ‘What were those daddy?’ they will ask.