A spokesman, of sorts, for the government has indicated that legislation will be considered to help combat ongoing online content piracy if 'voluntary arrangements' cannot be reached.
The comments were made by Parliamentary Under Secretary For Innovation, Universities And Skills, Lord Triesman, on the BBC's iPM programme, presumably in a feature about the closure of controversial BitTorrent tracking site OiNK yesterday. Talking about how music continued to be shared online without the permission of the copyright owners, Triesman said that the government recognised that more needed to be done because "if creative artists can't earn a living as a result of the work they produce [because of illegal file sharing], then we will kill off creative artists and that would be a tragedy".
However, Triesman's talk of legislating seemed to dwell in the main on the continued debate as to how much responsibility internet service providers should take in combating illegal file sharing. After all, existing copyright laws already essentially make profiting from online piracy illegal, and as for targeting individual file sharers, over and above past civil litigation in that domain, the Lord didn't seem that keen, saying the government had no interest in "hounding 14-year-olds who shared music".
But on the ISP front, Triesman implied the government will put pressure on the ISPs to take on more responsibility for cracking down on illegal file sharing, something they have so far resisted. He said that talks between the ISPs and the record industry were "progressing more promisingly than people might have thought six months ago", adding that "for the most part I think there are going to be successful voluntary schemes between the creative industries and ISPs. Our preferred position is that we shouldn't have to regulate". However, perhaps in a threat to the ISPs, he concluded "if we can't get voluntary arrangements we will legislate.
Needless to say, the BPI welcomed such talk, with their chief Geoff Taylor telling the Beeb: "We greatly welcome the government reiterating its view that ISPs should work with us to tackle the problem of internet piracy, or else face legislation. ISPs operate the pathways to digital music consumers. Through our talks with the ISP community we are hopeful that together we can arrive at voluntary co-operative agreements that work to the benefit of the whole digital marketplace".
But the Internet Service Providers Association were keen to remind us that excessive tracking of the distribution of content via their networks was not as easy as perhaps the BPI or government suggest, saying: "ISPA does not support abuses of copyright and intellectual property theft, however, ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their network. ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope. ISPs deal with many more packets of data each day than postal services and data protection legislation actually prevents ISPs from looking at the content of the packets sent".