Legal Research

This code is a crucial first step to bring into play the measures to tackle online breach of copyright in the Digital Economy Act 2010. It provides the ground rules for a new system giving Copyright owners a channel to require Internet Service Providers to send notification to subscribers when it appears to the Copyright owner that they have evidence of infringement by that subscriber.

Evidence of infringement rather than proof is all that is required to get your IP address into this new system, but there are checks and balances to protect the individual subscriber. For example only ?repeat offenders? will end up on the Copyright Infringement List, which can be requested from the ISP by the Copyright owner. In order to obtain your personal details, as opposed to a list of IP addresses, the copyright owner will need a court order.

What seems less well thought through is where libraries and other providers of wi fi access might stand. It seems possible that we could be regarded as ISPs in the terms of the Act in which case the duties of ISPs could apply to Libraries. Initially it is clear they won?t, as Ofcom has decided to apply the new measures to the big players, fixed ISPs with more than 400,000 subscribers, but this could be extended to cover other ISPs.