Well, the ayes have it, the ayes have it; the Digital Economy Bill looks set to become the Digital Economy Act.  A bad day for all users of the internet throughout the UK.

My upset has nothing to do with my support for legalised filesharing — though I do believe that copyright is in dire need of reform and that filesharing creates rather than destroys markets, that’s an issue to be covered another day in a different blog post.

I am more concerned with the fact that the measures outlined in the bill will not work.  Thanks to anonymity networks like Tor, illegal filesharing through otherwise legal technologies (such as BitTorrent and YouTube), the “dynamic” IP addresses in use by most ISPs and an inability to adequately protect ones own wireless connection from serious attacks, we’ve been placed at the top of a slippery slope.

All that this bill will accomplish is pushing illegal filesharing further underground, forcing it to invent new untrackable technologies and/or abuse existing old ones.  It is only a matter of time before the big “creative industries” realise that their sales have not gone up and that their profits have not increased. It is only a matter of time before they claim that nobody purchased Lily Allen’s new album because of people trading files via e-mail, posting DVDs and USB sticks to one another via smail mail, and recording their own MP3s from low-quality media streams.  The suggestion that people don’t want to buy crap music they can hear for free every day on the radio is apparently too radical.

The answer to these problems?  More legislation pushed through by people who do not understand the internet and less freedom for its users.

I’m also very uncomfortable with the way that copyright infringement through non-filesharing means are not mentioned (or, if they are, I’ve yet to hear about it).  Where is the crackdown on the lending of books and CDs?  Where is the legislation that says it is illegal to create copies of television shows you have watched and distribute them to your friends?  Presumably the bill would not have passed, had the elderly been aware they’d have their VHS players confiscated.

Excuse me, whilst I write another letter to my MP.