The FT reports that :

The UK’s Labour government will on Friday tell internet service providers they will be hit with legal sanctions from April next year unless they take concrete steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films.

Britain would be one of the first countries in the world to impose such sanctions. Service providers say what the government wants them to do would be like asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted.

Welcome to the Nanny State extending it’s reach into areas it doesn’t understand. 

I am not a fan of pirate software, music or other files, as copyright infringement is simply wrong.  But I am even less keen on Government intervention in areas they clearly do not understand.   A couple of weeks ago we were given a sneak preview of the “three strikes” regime of escalating sanctions, to be used by the ISP’s to stop illegal downloads.

The Department for Business, which will lead the bill’s development, has suggested that users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time.

How exactly are the ISP’s going to know what is being downloaded and whether it is legal or illegal.  How are they going to patrol all the P2P traffic? What about “wi-fi piggybacking”? IP masking…  The list of tech solutions to avoid the Governments ideas is endless….

On top of that look at the mess that Tiscali and BPI are in when they implemented the 3 strikes rule of their own.

As mentioned in the DRM blog by Jude Umeh a number of the suggested alternatives may include:

pre-emptive adoption of a voluntary and self-regulatory process that is defined and agreed by the ISPs; or indeed the creation of better value propositions by content owners that can effectively compete with free or illegal content downloads (the BBC iPlayer is a prime example).

But the bottom line is that the Labour Government in the UK is once again interfering in our lives with little regard to the cost or ultimate outcome..