SuffolkOnline.net

The highly anticipated digital britain report was released on Thursday 16th June and here is Suffolk Online's and many other comentators main summary of the report. The full report can be found at www.culture.gov.uk

The key points to arise from the report are the following:

1. The UK is to have a Universal Service Commitment of 2Mbps (2 Mega bits per second) by 2012, this is to be funded in a number of ways, £200m surplus from the Digital Switch Over Help Scheme, commercial gain through tender contract, contributions from private partners, money from other public sector organisations, consumers themselves by resolving wiring issues in their homes. Additionally the wider coverage obligations placed on mobile broadband providers will help to meet this obligation.
2. The report does not set an minimum speed for upstream or latency, though does suggest that money spent on meeting the USO should be spent in such a way that does not preclude expansion to Next Generation speeds in the future.
3. A 50p per month on fixed copper lines (basically telephone lines, i.e. residential phone lines, business analogue lines, ISDN2 lines and cable telephone lines. This £6 a year will go into the Next Generation Fund, the purpose of which is to fund the roll-out of Next Generation services in the third of the country where at this time commercial operators are saying solutions like fibre are not feasible. A sum of £150m to £170m is expected to be raised per year from the fund, with the aim of connecting most of the final third by 2017.
4. The 50p levy is not part of providing the basic 2Mbps USO.
5. In the area of illegal file sharing the report outlines a proposal to legislate and give Ofcom the a duty in reducing the amount of file sharing over the Internet in the UK. This will comprise of notifying account holders when it appears their account has been used to infringe copyright, and an obligation to keep records so that serious repeat infringers can be identified and thus allow targeted court action against the most damaging breaches of copyright.
6. A code of practice to underline these obligations will be produced, which should set out the processes for rights holders to inform Ofcom.
7. Ofcom will also be provided with additional powers, so that if this warning system does not have a significant impact on illegal file sharing then Ofcom can place additional conditions on broadband providers. For example blocking of sites, port blocking, bandwidth capping, data volume caps, traffic shaping. This measures are only expected to be used if the overall level of illegal file-sharing does not diminish after a 6 month initial period.
8. The report outlines that it plans for the first stages of the warning system will be deemed successful if infringement is reduced by 70% in the first year.
9. Fair use gets a mention, since at present even if you own a copy of an album on CD, ripping it onto your MP3 player is a violation of copyright law. Nothing concrete appears, other than to mention that this area is heavily constrained by the EU copyright framework.