DEA - Ofcom Launch Meeting

I attended a very useful meeting at Ofcom this morning where they launched their plans for the first stage of implementing the copyright infringement powers in the Digital Economy Act 2010. There were about 70 people there covering an impressive range of stakeholders: businesses, hotels, consumer rights, us, as well as both fixed and mobile ISPs and a wide range of creative industries.

Ofcom will be working in parallel on four streams - the Initial Obligations Code, Appeals, Costs and Measurement - with a target of a "soft launch" of the process at the start of January 2011. That is recognised as a very tight timescale - to allow consultation with stakeholders and the European Commission they are looking to develop a first draft of the Initial Obligations Code (covering notifications and the serious infringers list) before the end of May for public consultation in June and July.

There was also the opportunity to talk to the Ofcom staff who will be working on each of these streams. I had raised the problematic issue of defining "ISPs" in the Question and Answer session so I, a business networks person and a hotel networks person grabbed the Ofcom Code person and quickly got him to agree the need for some work on these and other "problem cases".

The good news is that Ofcom seemed receptive to my suggestion that "subscriber" would be a disastrous place to put universities and colleges because it would force us to replace existing good practice by something more expensive and less effective, and lose the opportunity to educate infringers. So I hope that the spectre of "universities being disconnected" (by anyone other than JISC!) will soon be laid to rest.

There is still a debate to be had on whether universities and colleges are "ISPs" or "communications providers", but, since the only practical difference should be whether it's Ofcom or JANET(UK) telling you to implement the JANET Acceptable Use Policy, I'm relatively relaxed about that. Especially so, since Ofcom do seem to recognise that (if only to keep manageable the number of "ISPs" they have to regulate) there has to be a threshold level of complaints below which "ISPs" are regarded as doing a sufficiently good enough job themselves by self-regulation. I very much hope that all JANET-connected sites would fall below that threshold.

So progress, I think, though I fear my diary now needs to be matched with Ofcom's for the rest of this year at least!