NUK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has delivered a speech, calling on net firms, advertisers and credit card companies to cut ties with websites that link to unlawful content. In a speech to the Royal Television Society, he said he wanted to make
it harder for such sites to prosper. Ideally the government would like to see Google remove pirate sites from its search engine completely. But Google's response suggested this was unlikely. Without a court order, any copyright owner can
already use our removals process to inform us of copyright infringing content and have it removed from Google Search, the firm said in a statement. In his speech, Hunt denied that blocking access to pirated content was an attack on net
neutrality: Unlawfully distributing copyrighted material is theft - and a direct assault on the freedoms and rights of creators of content to be rewarded fairly for their efforts
We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the High Street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Likewise we should be entitled to make it more difficult to access sites that are
dedicated to the infringement of copyright.
Hunt outlined measures for the new Communications Act which is due to become law towards the end of the current Parliament in 2015.
- A cross-industry body, perhaps modelled on the Internet Watch Foundation, to be charged with identifying infringing websites against which action could be taken
- A streamlined legal process to make it possible for the courts to act quickly
- A responsibility on search engines and ISPs to take reasonable steps to make it harder to access sites that a court has deemed contain unlawful content or promote unlawful distribution of content
- A responsibility on advertisers to take
reasonable steps to remove their advertisements from these sites
- A responsibility on credit card companies and banks to remove their services from these sites.
Jim Killock, chief executive of the Open Rights Group, said the proposals set a dangerous precedent: It is pretty dangerous to ask credit card companies or Google to decide who is guilty.
Once again Mr Hunt has listened to the lobbyists and has made no attempt to work out the scale of the problem. We are back where we were with the DEA, which is proving unworkable and an expensive nightmare.
|