Engaged in an overwhelming battle against online piracy they are planning to win, the UK government has not been taking the best decisions lately as we already noted in a previous post this week.

After the politicians’ intention to alter the Digital Economy Bill by introducing a regulation that empowered judges to block access to a specific website if suspected to promote copyright infringement caused a wave of public discontentment, the UK government tried to fix things but only managed to come up with yet another outrageous solution. In fact, the “reassessed” proposal announced by politicians may have an even more pronounced negative impact on perfectly legitimate online resources, as Cory Doctorow describes in his write up in The Guardian:

“As our routine media files have increased in size – multi-megapixel images, home videos, audio recordings of meetings and so on – it's become increasingly difficult to use email to share data privately with family, friends and colleagues, because most email servers croak over really big files. For example, the sound editor for my podcasts uses a web locker to send me the mastered audiofiles for my review (and he's not the only audio person who relies on this; many's the time I've had an audiobook publisher send me an MP3 of an audiobook for review through a web locker).

There are plenty of personal uses too: my parents live in Canada and are always hungry for video of their granddaughter, but I don't want to make our home movies available on the public internet, so web lockers save the day for us. And when my immigration attorneys needed a mountain of scanned bank statements sent to their office for my application for permanent residence in the UK, a web locker made it easy to convey an encrypted archive to them. There's no way to square this need for private file sharing with the entertainment industry's demand that all files be placed in the public sphere, where they can be inspected for infringement.”

In addition, Doctorow explains that the restraints put forward by the government aren’t likely to succeed in stopping illegal file sharing anyway. He believes that politicians’ measures will only work in the detriment of legitimate Internet users whose activities depend on such technology, while also placing these people at risk of privacy violations.

Politicians seem to have strayed far from the right track in their effort to stop copyright infringement and are now missing important aspects of the overall picture. They have associated technology with piracy, and are now trying to block the latter indirectly by constraining access to various resources on the Web, whether for legitimate use or not. UK authorities could surely use a change of perspective in their current approach.