Opinion: Rough justice for BT

The High Court has used the Digital Economy Act (DEA) to order BT to block file sharing web site Newzbin2 and any future IP address or URL it may choose to use. BT has also been ordered to cover all the costs of implementing the block and the lion’s share of the rights-holders’ legal costs.

Initially, this made sense to me. It’s like determining who is responsible for preventing CDs and DVDs being stolen from a shop – should it be the rights holders, the shop owners or the police? The logical answer is the shop owners.

That’s why my local HMV store uses electronic article surveillance, CCTV cameras and good old security guards.

If you apply the same logic to the Newzbin2 case, you can argue that it is the ISPs who enable other web sites to host illegal content and therefore it should be them who ensure that the copyrighted material is not available to download illegally.

However, the example of the shop has one clear flaw. Although it is copyrighted material that has been stolen, it may not have then been sold on for profit, whereas web sites such as Newzbin2 make a profit from indexing illicit copies of films and providing users with a link to download the film they search for.

So a better analogy might be a person who sells stolen DVDs on the street, as they would be profiting directly from an illegal trade in copyrighted material.

In this scenario, it would be the responsibility of the authorities in the form of the police and trading standards to put a stop to this illegal trade. In doing so, they would be working to protect the business interests and profits of the studios that created the copyrighted material.

Similarly, what BT has been ordered to do by the High Court is, in effect, to spend its own money on protecting the commercial interests of the rights holders.

Blocking Newzbin2 and its ilk will only benefit the rights holders, so shouldn’t rights holders be the ones to cover the costs?

At the end of the day, if BT and other ISPs have to pay for the privilege of blocking file sharing sites on behalf of rights holders, they will factor these costs into their pricing and pass them on to their customers, ie you and me.

And in the meantime, those who profit from illegal file sharing and those cheapskate consumers who take advantage of it will find new ways to indulge in their nefarious business.

This begs the biggest question of all: will the DEA and these blocking orders even make a difference?

@ComputingSooraj