DEA Historical Presentation

I was invited to give a talk on the Digital Economy Act 2010 to JANET's South-East Regional User Group earlier this week. For a bit of variety I based this one around the history of the Act. Existing civil legal mechanisms didn't provide an effective way to deal with a very large number of copyright infringements, each of which was well below the level that would have made it a crime. The original consultations in 2008 proposed a low-cost notification system to encourage the majority of low-level infringers to move to lawful sources of content, plus a minor change to the existing civil process to allow it to focus on repeat infringers who remain below the criminal threshold. Criminal law is still reasonably effective in imposing effective sanctions on those who make copyright breach the basis of their business. It seems to me that most of the controversy over the Act has resulted from the subsequent mixing up of infringement and sanctions across those three layers of seriousness.

While writing the presentation it struck me that the original proposals are still more or less there in the Act, so with appropriate implementation we might still get back to the ideas last seen Chapter 4 of the Digital Britain Report which still seem to me a proportionate response to what is undoubtedly a real problem.