The fight against illegal file sharing is being taken to new height of ridiculousness in the UK where law-abiding citizens will have to, once again, pay up to bail out the music and movie industry for their own failures. The proposed Digital Economy Bill, which would force ISPs to kick-off alleged illegal file sharers, could end up costing broadband subscribers up to £500 million (about $800 million) per year and this is coming from the UK government itself.
The new law which is still under review would force ISPs to police their customers and cut off or slow down the connection of anyone the anti-piracy groups claim is infringing. The rights holders claim that these measures are necessary to stave off the 'plague' of piracy, which is wreaking havoc with the content industry's revenues. This despite the fact that both the music and the film industries are seeing growth in 2009.
When the legal proposal was first made public, the ISPs, expectedly, were very critical of the measures and estimated that the costs to implement them would outweigh the actual benefits. A figure of £365 million (slightly more than $580 million) was put forward by the Internet providers. It turns out that even this number may have been conservative as a new government report estimates that the costs may be closer to £500 million.
Just issuing the initial warning letters for all the supposed infringers would add up to £1.40 per subscriber, the report claims. Some estimate that for the proposed law would add about £25 per year to each subscriber's bill, though this figure comes from the ISPs and not the government report. Naturally, the ISPs are broadly against the plans.
“Broadband consumers shouldn’t have to bail out the music industry. If they really think it’s worth spending vast sums of money on these measures then they should be footing the bill; not the consumer,” Charles Dunstone, CEO of Carphone Warehouse, which owns TalkTalk the biggest broadband provider in the UK,
told The Times.
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