According to the BBC News Website today, the UK Government are on the disconnect net pirates band wagon again.

People who persistently download illegal content will be cut off from the net, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has announced.

Speaking at a government-sponsored forum he said the UK would introduce a similar policy to France.

It means persistent pirates will be sent two warning letters before facing disconnection from the network.

This really is going to lead to no end of problems, and this has been echoed recently by the ISP Talk Talk in recent weeks.
Its going to be difficult to clearly identify (without extreme costs, forensic investigation and more) if the actual ISP customer is responsible for the infringement on downloaded material they shouldn’t, be that audio, video or other.

To me it makes the assumption that all UK consumers are security savvy, and the products they purchase and use are configured securely. As you can see from one of my previous posts on wardriving, so many Wireless Access Points are not secure, or use weak easily hackable security controls. So with this in mind many people could be stealing the bandwidth from these consumers, and getting up to all sorts. People may argue that its the consumers responsibility to protect their Internet connection, and your probably correct, however in reality we know this isn’t currently the case. I think there may be some interesting court cases if this goes ahead.

Its also worth considering what this actually means to the ISPs. Surely its going to require investment and resource for them to monitor, track and act on this possible new legislation. Will this be paid for by the Government (tax payer), or will the ISPs need to look to pass this cost onto its customers. Either way its most probably Joe Public will end up paying.

I apologies for being cynical, but surely this time could be spent resolving another problem. Oh well 😀