figgy

Completely agree with all the points being made. Firstly, I should say that the link posted by teejay is to all the original presentations and papers from a meeting organised by the Strategic Content Alliance (JISC) and the British Library on June 29th. The aim of the meeting which was attended by representatives of public intermediary organisations, Museums, Libraries, Cultural and Heritage organisatios, Universities, LA's, RBC's, Schools, lawyers, BT and others, was to mobilise the public intermediaries to respond to the OFCOM consultation on the obligations. It's too late to do anything about the Act itself but what we can do is argue for some type of exclusion for public itermediaries from the obligations which will be costly to implement and highly unlikely to produce a result for the copyright owners. By responding to the consultation there is a hope that we could stop people like yourselves being told to spend thousands, tens of thousands, pssibly hundreds of thousands of pounds on systems that will prove useless in achieving their objectives. Unless we respond and make it clear how inappropriate the obligations are to the internet service provision chain that covers LA's/schools we will get lumped in with everyone else and it will cost you either in order to conform or as a fine for non-conformance!

Hi All The Digital Economy Bill became the Digital Economy Act on April 8th, as part of the Act ISP's are required to fulfill certain obligations, the obligations are onerous and potentially hugely costly as they are all about putting in place the measures required to identify an infringer of copyright. As so correctly pointed out by Rydra that task is huge and at the end of the day is unlikely to result in any meaningful kind of prosecution, however, these are legal obligations and whether they produce the result the music/film industry is looking for or not is almost a side issue. The issue you need to think about now is the cost of meeting the obligations whilst you're budgets are being squeezed harder than ever before! The ofcom consultation that is open now, and it's not too late to respond, is about the obligations. It is vitally important that you don't let the obligations go through as they are because they'll cost you a fortune to implement and if you don't implement them you'll be liable for a fine of £250k should you (LA, school, public intermediary of any kind providing access to the internet) be classed as an ISP, which is looking highly likely.