Digital Economy Act

The Digital Economy Bill completed its highly abbreviated journey through the House of Commons last night and now only requires the final approval of the House of Lords to become law. To get enough support from opposition parties two further amendments have been made to the later stages of the copyright enforcement provisions:

The Government has published a consultation on how the costs of the notification obligations under the Digital Economy Bill should be shared out between Rights-holders, ISPs and subscribers. Responses are required by May 25th. (And no, you haven't missed anything. It still is a Bill, not an Act, though consulting on its implementation does seems to presume that something pretty like the current text will be passed before the General Election on May 6th).

To complement my summary of the problems for universities and colleges with the Digital Economy Bill, Consumer Focus have published an analysis of the problems for consumers.

I've been asked by a number of people to set out the current problems that the Digital Economy Bill is likely to create specifically for universities and colleges, so here's a summary. This reflects the state of the Bill at the end of the Lords' Report stage, and doesn't cover more general problems around liability, reporting, disconnection and blocking that have been widely discussed elsewhere.