Digital Rights or Digital Wrongs?
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Reaction to news that the upcoming Digital Economy Bill could potentially spell the end for public Wi-Fi in the UK has, not surprisingly, been pretty negative. Essentially this Bill would require public Wi-Fi providers to provide impractically high levels of copyright protection in order to stop their premises being turned into piracy hotspots.
The difficulty lies in how this is policed and the present solution being put forward is that Wi-Fi providers are to be held responsible if a customer uses their Wi-Fi to download copyrighted material. An ISP can send out a warning to an individual subscriber, but when you’re talking about a single subscription being shared by hundreds of different itinerant users the waters quickly become muddied.
Clearly, if changes in the law do make the position of public Wi-Fi providers untenable, then it will severely impact the connectivity landscape, particularly in our major cities. One point I haven’t seen raised is how this could potentially impact our creaking infrastructure in the UK. We’re already behind the curve in terms of the quality of 3G available here, with increasing mobile data traffic only serving to increase the strain on networks. What happens if more users are forced to connect via 3G because of the lack of Wi-Fi options?
There doesn’t seem to be an obvious or at least palatable middle-ground between punishing end-users and punishing the public Wi-Fi providers in this case. There are a couple of areas that need addressing:
- revisiting the whole minefield of digital rights management / copyright to try to put an end to illegal activity
- from a technology perspective, we have to start being much more clever in the way we monitor internet usage to weed out the users that are up to no good.
Widely available Wi-Fi is now critical to our business and social infrastructure and the Digital Economy Bill, in its present state, does not appear to be doing anything to nurture this. It will be extremely interesting to watch how this story develops over the coming months.
Tags: internet access, UK, wi-fi access
