IPO proposes blocking and bandwidth restrictions

One of the key online issues tackled by the initial Digital Britain report was the proposed creation of a Digital Rights Agency (DRA) to be able to tackle copyright piracy online.

Much debate has followed about how the issues can be effectively tackled - and in fact has been raging since before the ISPs agreed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Ofcom and copyright stakeholders last year.

The government's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is suggesting that the blocking of certain protocols and bandwidth restrictions might be the answer, saying in their proposals:

"Development of codes of practice around enforcement measures to prevent and reduce online copyright infringement. These would need to be strong enough to be likely to make a real impact on the problem, and could include, for example, such approaches as protocol blocking or bandwidth, in relation to persistent infringers."

Such moves are high cost for ISPs, and have debatable benefits - for example P2P protocols will become encrypted should port blocking become widespread.

They are also talking about not just tackling the problem over P2P, but online as a whole - which is not surprising given the huge amount of copyrighted content on newsgroups for a start.