ChatDD Blog

How would you feel if your cellphone network wrote to you on behalf of sports governing bodies demanding you quit sharing video clips of goals, home runs and slam dunks? It seems it could happen: file sharing on cellphones and the distribution of sports video clips look like becoming the latest forms of digital content to come under the scope of the onerous global copyright clampdown the G8 heads of government discussed in Japan this week.

As we revealed last week, the G8 is pushing its member states - and their fellow travellers - to enshrine a high level treaty called the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in their national laws. Among many other measures, ACTA-based legislation will ensure that Internet Service Providers around the world are held liable for the downloading and uploading actions of their customers ??? forcing the ISPs to disconnect the broadband lines of people who use music and video P2P networks for fear of facing criminal sanctions themselves.

But one communique issued from the midst of the G8 hints at a fresh raft of terribly smart brainwaves. The G8 Intellectual Property Experts Group on 8 July admits that in addition to focusing on copyright enforcement for ???recorded music, motion pictures, software, books and journals??? the group is, alongside the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, studying the use of the humble cellphone in copyright infringement.

“The study will focus on digital piracy…through such methods as internet piracy, direct computer to computer transfers, LAN file sharing and mobile phone sharing. The study may also incorporate a case study of digital piracy in the sports broadcasting industry,” it says.

Join a few dots and you can see where this is heading: it’s not only ISPs that will be monitoring their users for copyright infringement, but also cellphone networks. There won’t be single digital thing you can do that someone, somewhere won’t be monitoring. When will copyright holders realise that getting companies to attack their own customers is very, very bad business?

The visionary computer scientist Jaron Lanier once said: “The internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it”.

People attacked by their own internet and cellphone providers will be routing around them, too.

Paul Marks, Technology Correspondent, New Scientist