Digital Economy Act challenged by UK parliamentarians:
The Tory Coalition partner and Julian Huppert, a liberal Democrat MP, have challenged the UK copyright legislation. They suggested a motion which would dismantle parts of the legislation that depics website blocking.
Julian Huppert, a member of the Parliament who was elected from Cambridge and is the chair of the Liberal Democrats’ IT working group, famous for introducing a number of amendments to the Protection of freedoms Bill. The motion is to eradicate and affect the sections 17 and 18 of the Digital Economy Act. These sections allow for the blocking of the sites when found of violating any copyrights of a company or individual.
Liberals to take down DEA:
The media reports told that the idea couldn’t reach a conclusion because the session of parliament ran out of time. However the environment in the Liberals camp suggested that they were ready to take down the Digital Economy Act. Julian Huppert admitted the fact that the conclusion could not be reached for the amendment but he also said that they would keep looking for opportunities to raise their voice again and again. This law was actually introduced to protect Hollywood from the growing digital or online piracy. This act includes in itself the authority to disconnect the copyright violators from the web itself, it even enables the authorities to disable a website or block it. BT and TalkTalk have already started to oppose the law, being the country’s Internet service providers. They were granted to submit a fresh appeal against the law in the court about a week ago.
Weakness in DEA:
According to the Digital Economy Act a copyright holder has to just suspect piracy and warn the authorities about it and the service would be instantly taken off line thus protecting the copyright material. In other words evidence would not be wanted at the moment of telling the authorities about the copyright violation. However, many critics think that the Digital Economy act was passed in a rush during the last days of the Labor Government. And it is due to this reason that some of the Liberal Democrats have formally asked to eradicate some of the points in the legislation.
Split Opinions:
This act could have been criticized by the conservatives and they could had blamed the Labor part for such a legislation, but they couldn’t do it because this would anger their fellows in the entertainment industry. That is why they have only allowed a 6-month review of the current IP legislation. Vaizey criticized the challenge by the BT and TalkTalk in the high court as “odd”. Not a new thing though as Vaizey is the one who is promoting the new legislation.