Digital Economy Act Critics Propose Plan B, Would Put Onus Back On Copyright Holders To Prove Guilt

The UK is much further along with having adult discussions about Internet piracy. The result of those discussions may be controversial, such as that subset of the Digital Economy Act that requires ISPs to monitor all traffic sent over their infrastructure for infringing content, thereby exposing themselves to “you didn’t do enough to stop this” lawsuits, but at least they’re having a conversation about it.

The best part of a conversation is, of course, the give-and-take. The people looking out for the content side of thing—the studios and whatnot—have already had their say, and now the other side are saying: hold on a minute.

Make way for Plan B.

The idea here would be to put the onus on copyright holders to prove that a site was hosting illegal content. No more capriciously saying, “This site has bad stuff, block access to it!”

OK, you can claim that, but before we do anything we’re going to need to see some proof.

A shocking idea, yes.

How much of an impact piracy really has, who knows? There’s no accurate way of tracking it, right? Of all the BitTorrent trackers in the world, all the Rapidshare-like sites, binary groups, IRC. You’d have just as much luck trying to count each individual grain of sand in the Sahara.