Digital Economy Act - what’s the impact for UK organisations?
With Ofcom announcing draft proposals on how they will implement the legislation outlined in the Digital Economy Act to address downloads of copyrighted material, we are moving closer to the full implementation.
Most of the debate and controversy around the Act so far has been focused on home users, but UK organisations also need to ensure that they are taking steps to prevent illegal downloads by their users.
“Organisations may have assumed that the Act only applies to residential customers, however the Act applies to any broadband subscriber including businesses, schools, colleges and universities,” said Stephen Clark, Solicitor and member of the Intellectual Property group at commercial law firm MBM Commercial LLP. “Organisations who, knowingly or otherwise, allow their IT resources to be used to download copyright material could face the same penalties as a residential customer, including degradation of service, bandwidth limitation or account suspension.”
You can read Bloxx’s full press release.
So does your organisation have adequate technology and processes in place to ensure that users are not able to download copyright material? Here are a few key points that you need to ensure.
- Do you have an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) in place that covers the downloading of copyrighted material and the consequences for doing this?
- Are users aware of the AUP and are they frequently reminded of its existence?
- Have you a Web filter in place that can block access to P2P applications and websites that might contain copyright material? Is the Web filter configured to prevent the downloading of media files – MP3, MPG, AVI etc?
- Have you restricted access at your firewall to ports that are specifically required for business applications?
- Are your client machines locked down to prevent users from installing P2P or downloading applications and tools?
It will be interesting to see what happens when Ofcom finalise their processes for dealing with downloaders and how they will deal with the stated resistance of the ISPs to the Act. Nonetheless, organisations will not be immune from prosecution and it will be intriguing to watch how things develop over the next few months.
