UK ISPs To Pay 25% of Copyright Enforcement Costs

Andorin writes "The UK's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has released a report (PDF) related to the new Digital Economy Act. The debate between copyright holders and ISPs about who should front the costs for the enforcement of the Act's anti-piracy provisions has come to a close: Rights holders will pay 75% of the copyright enforcement costs, with the remaining 25% of the bill going to ISPs (and therefore their customers). Says the Minister for Communications, Ed Vaizey: 'Protecting our valuable creative industries, which have already suffered significant losses as a result of people sharing digital content without paying for it, is at the heart of these measures... We expect the measures will benefit our creative economy by some £200m per year and as rights holders are the main beneficiaries of the system, we believe our decision on costs is proportionate to everyone involved.' Not surprisingly, some ISPs and consumer groups are up in arms about the decision, with one ISP calling it a government subsidy of the entertainment industries."

Comments

Thank you for legitimizing bittorrenting

[Anonymous Coward]

This cost will get passed on to the ISP's customers. Everyone with broadband will be required to subsidize the entertainment industry as it pretends to die from losses to piracy while reporting massive profits. If they're forcing me to compensate them for losses based on arbitrary made-up amounts for 'imaginary' lost sales then I will force them to compensate me by giving me free movies & tv shows based on my arbitrarily assigned figures for its value. I think a 2500th of it's retail price (as they like that figure and use it to calculate lawsuit settlements) is fair. I'll be more than happy to bittorrent the equivalent value with my broadband connection.

Re:Thank you for legitimizing bittorrenting

[Joce640k]

I hope the ISPs bill the monitoring of users at 25% of the cost of enforcement, therefore paying nothing to the RIAA.

Even better, bill it at 50% and ask the RIAA to make up the difference. The RIAA uses the same sort of accounting on artists so it's only fair....

Re:What do UKers think?

[TooMuchToDo]

How can we become your customer (I'm a fan of putting my money where my mouth is)?

Re:What do UKers think?

[eudaemon]

So you don't mind if we restore copyright to something 10-15 years, then, since the likelyhood your getting paid is almost nil in any case?

Re:What do UKers think?

[TheRaven64]

10 years would be fine. My sales drop to close to zero after 3 years, so I doubt it would affect me much, other than by giving my publisher an incentive to commission new stuff more frequently.

This, by the way, is exactly what the Gowers report, commissioned by the last UK government, recommended. Labour extended copyright terms shortly after reading this report. Apparently we're getting more of the same from the ConDems.

Re:What do UKers think?

[TheRaven64]

You could buy something from this page, if you can find something that you find interesting.

I've not tried for a while, but Google used to return a pirate download site as the first hit when you searched for my Xen book's title. Some asshat also decided to post a copy of the PDF version to the Xen Devel mailing list a while ago. I don't encourage piracy, but I don't see the point in doing anything that harms legitimate customers in an attempt to reduce it, which is why I added a clause to the contracts for all of the books that I've written (the third one's due out later this year) forbidding the use of DRM in the eBook editions.

I recently talked to a guy in India who pirated my second book. His family's income for a week is about the cover price (he's using it to learn GNUstep - he can't afford a Mac either) so I've clearly not lost anything from his piracy - he couldn't have afforded it anyway, and he wrote a positive review of it so I might have got some sales out of that.

Re:What do UKers think?

[TheRaven64]

See: RIAA, MPAA, writer's guild,

None of these are producing copyrighted works, they are organisations of lawyers representing the publishers who won't adapt. My publisher is happy to change their business model (see: Safari Books Online, InformIT) when they think it can make them more money. The RIAA and MPAA (and writer's guild, although to a lesser extent) are groups of lawyers who would rather change the world than change themselves.

Richard Stallman and his freakish infectious copyright ideals.

I don't really disagree with Stallman - I've signed a copyright assignment with the FSF for the GNUstep stuff I've done and my (second) Objective-C runtime is a GNU project. Stallman's ideas are quite simple - creating is harder more valuable than copying, so that is what should be financially rewarded. The copyright system exists so that you can do the hard bit (creating something original) for free and then get people to pay you for doing the easy bit (creating copies of it).