Copyright Law

UK ISP: Idea of Stopping File-Sharing is ?Very Naive?

By soulxtc

Carphone Warehouse CEO Charles Dunstone points out that people will always find a way to share content with one another despite the best efforts of copyright holders and politicians.

Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report, part of the project launched back in October 2008 to secure the UK’s place at the “front of digital and telecommunications innovation and quality,” is due out later this month and will outline what the UK govt will do to combat the problem of illegal file-sharing.

Charles Dunstone, CEO of Carphone Warehouse, home of of Talk Talk, Britain’s 3rd largest ISP, recently spoke out on the matter, observing that no matter what the govt does file-sharers will always win in the end.

“If you try speed humps or disconnections for P2P, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way,” he said. “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.”

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said last week at Music Week?s ?Making Online Music Pay? conference that the govt will force ISPs to apply ?technical solutions” - i.e. speed bumps - rather than disconnect users a la a “three-strikes” graduated response system.

Dunstone furthers by pointing out that there are countless ways to share copyrighted material illegally aside from simple P2P programs like KaZaA or BitTorrent.

“If people want to share content they will find another way to do it,” he said. “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 P2P and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive.”

G-mail attachments anyone?

Dunstone was was the first to reject British Phonographic Industry?s(BPI) proposed ?three-strikes-and-your-out? scheme last year which would have required ISPs to disconnect customers repeatedly accused of illegal file-sharing.

?Our position is very clear, we are the conduit that gives users access to the Internet, we do not control the Internet nor do we control what our users do on the Internet,” he said at the time.

At least someone understands what the Internet’s all about.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on June 09, 2009 (boomark / email).