By: MarkJ - 12 June, 2009 (12:57 PM) - Score: 1068 - Piracy

The Federation Against Software Theft and Investors in Software (FAST IiS) has launched an attack on the government's suggestion that illegal downloader’s could face reductions in their broadband speed instead of being cut-off from their ISP (original news). John Lovelock, FAST IiS's Chief Executive, called the idea "a waste of time" and warned that technology would find ways around it.


FAST IiS contends that the only credible measure that will be respected by persistent online "digital thieves" is for the Government to introduce the recommendations from the 2006 Gowers Review. This government sponsored independent review of intellectual property made the suggestion that offences in the digital world should be punished in the same way as crimes in the physical world with the same sentences.


We certainly agree that a court of law is the only true way to tackle serious levels of piracy, though it's perhaps not practical for targeting the millions of UK consumers who now partake in such activity - often without even knowing that what they're doing is illegal. Many of the statistics produced to show the damage also fail to factor in real-world spending trends (i.e. somebody downloading 1000 songs probably wouldn’t ever have bought that many anyway).

FAST IiS itself clearly favours the disconnection rout as a punishment, one which ironically suffers from even more pitfalls than the notion of reducing a customer’s connection speed or blocking P2P access/sites. The only true way to know if somebody has done something illegal is to examine their hard disk and that requires a court, no other method would be reliable enough.

The reasons why people do it in the first place must also be tackled. Ultimately there is no one solution that will solve everything, though better education and more legal/fair priced online digital distribution services would be a good place to start. We’ll do a more detailed analysis of whatever the Digital Britain report proposes next week.