UK copyright lobby group has eyes on potential piracy activity on future 4G networks, as it calls on regulators to includes wireless networks, perhaps even public Wi-Fi networks, its in anti-piracy regime
The UK's Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) wants the controversial Digital Economy Act (DEA) to apply to wireless broadband technologies, including 4G, not just fixed lined based broadband.
The DEA aims to curb the piracy problem by introducing monitoring and a graduated response regime, similar to the Hadopi regime in France. But currently, the law only applies to home fixed lined accounts, and this, the FAST says, is not good enough by the time the DEA is actually implemented, sometime around 2014.
"The issue is that by the time the DEA is finally implemented, technology could have moved on so far making the Act ineffective in helping to deal with those using 4G networks to share files. In its current form the DEA is not sufficiently flexible in scope to account for advances in technology," said the general counsel for FAST, Julian Heathcote Hobbins, in a statement on Monday.
While the statement makes no mention of public Wi-Fi networks, the call for flexibility in scope could very well include public Wi-Fi, something that the regulators, Ofcom, specifically omitted from the reaches of the DEA.
Ofcom has revealed that even the industry itself does not think 4G piracy is a "major problem" at present. The high cost of bandwidth for 4G connections, often tens and hundreds of times greater then that of fixed line connections, makes piracy cost prohibitive for most users, not to mention strict network management profiles that often throttles the speed of peer-to-peer sharing networks.
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