The copyright infringement provisions of the UK’s Digital Economy Act have caused a lot of controversy, not least amongst tech entrepreneurs who face being stifled, when small, technology-driven businesses are core to the future growth of the UK’s economy.
The Act creates the potential for disconnection resulting from the Act’s guilty-until-proven-innocent system. It also means less public wi-fi because of the extra costs on wi-fi providers. That means less innovation bubbling up from the primodial soup of entrepreneurs and developers and much less flexible working when everyone needs that right now.
Plus it also means a threat to sites that permit user-generated content and web locker and software-as-a-service platforms. Why? Because the Act’s web blocking provisions let copyright holders get a site taken down for taken down for inadvertently hosting a small amount of copyrighted content.
Which is why we’d encourage you to go and give your feedback on this issue to the government’s newly created feedback process on legislation.