A recent suggestion points that the government’s proposed Digital Economy Bill could cause serious concerns for the mobile broadband users in addition to the ripples it has already created throughout the industry.

The proposed bill intends to make copyright infringement laws stricter. It aims at introducing a policy of punishing offenders who download copyrighted material repeatedly. The punishment is temporary disconnection of their broadband lines. This policy has met with numerous protests and complaints.

According to the minister for Digital Britain Stephen Timms, the procedure for such punishment is not arbitrary. Once a person has been identified as infringing a copyright, the copyright holder can ask the ISP to send him to a letter of warning. If this does not work, only then will technical measures be put in place.

The measure of disconnection has however been perceived as being atrocious, and thousands of persons have signed a petition against the bill and forwarded it to the Prime Minister’s office.

However, according to technology business news website ZDNet UK, one of the problems that have been identified with the proposal is that though home broadband connections can be traced easily using IP addresses, it will be quite difficult to trace mobile broadband users. An official from the news website pointed out that multiple users use one IP address in mobile broadband and hence, it will be difficult to identify the individual infringers.

This multiple users issue has to be taken into consideration given the growth of mobile broadband internet usage, especially through iPhones and smart phones.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 6:13 am and is filed under End Users, School of Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.