Hollywood studios rightly want to protect their content from illegal downloads, but is it really the responsibility of the ISPs, writes Julian Clover.
I spent parts of the last week completely cut off from the internet. Lyme Regis, on the South coast of Britain, is probably one of the best places in the country for a week away, but it doesn’t do digital connectivity. There’s an argument that is also a potential selling point.
3G phone reception was poor, as was DAB, and I couldn’t get a DTT signal to the laptop. Broadband was also challenging; the house we’d rented didn’t have broadband and my normally reliable USB stick refused to work for much more than five minutes at a time.
I didn’t particularly want to do any work – besides my out of office reply seemed to be generating just as many messages as it saved – but you can use the web for fun things. Such as watching Peppa Pig on demand.
So we happened across a BT Fon connection and by magic we were connected. Fon works with a small box attached to the broadband router, so that you can rent out your broadband connection to other people.
You’ll be aware of course that I am, at least for the purposes of this column, a law abiding citizen. But what if I was the type of person who downloaded movies from illegal sites.
I mention this because of this week’s reported action by Disney, Fox and Paramount Pictures against Newzbin2 or specifically BT to force the telco to take down the site. Back to front net neutrality.
We’ve been here before. Last October it was UPC Ireland that emerged successfully from another filesharing case, this time involving music companies EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal.
Different scenarios, but two sides of the same coin, blocking the pipe on which the pirates depend. And it is that same pipe that the content owners need to sell their legitimate content to the public, be it through a managed service provided by the operator, or a third-party that has been legally licensed the content.
Platform operators do a lot to shut out piracy. Among other things they have to demonstrate that their content protection is up to the mark. If the CA doesn’t get studio approval they have to go somewhere else.
So how long before the studios forget about the courts and throw in a clause that asks the ISP side to ensure there is no leakage that messes up the business elsewhere.
Back on the South Coast, where in days gone by smugglers would land their booty after dark, it was difficult to download much more than the latest weather forecast. But would it be possible to have the owner of the Fon system cut off if a client downloaded a movie illegally.
