The UK is moving in a direction that will soon see the infamous Digital Economy Bill either become law or face defeat. In an effort to achieve the latter, citizens of the UK organized a petition on the Prime Minister's website. Today, the petition received a response from the Prime Minister's office.

The digest of the petition pleaded for the following:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abandon Lord Mandelson's plans to ban individuals from the internet based on their use of 'peer to peer' file sharing."

The petition continued:

"The use of P2P is neither illegal nor exclusive to copyright theft. Many free software providers use this form of distribution, as does the BBC’s iPlayer. If citizens are innocent until proven guilty, ISP’s would be forced to monitor internet usage to ensure that no copyrighted material is being transferred. This flagrant disregard for privacy is comparable to forcing the Post Office to search through parcels for photocopied documents or mixtape cassettes. Such requirements would place enormous strain on ISP’s whilst failing to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material through hidden IP’s, http or ftp. Who is punished in the case of shared family connections?"

Any petition that receives over 500 signatures is granted a response by the Prime Minister's office. This petition only received 550, but another similar petition has received over 33,000 and is the 4th most popular current petition.

We're not sure how pleased the petitioners will be, but there is some prospect of hope, considering the response does seem to address most of the concerns.

"We will not terminate the accounts of infringers - it is very hard to see how this could be deemed proportionate except in the most extreme – and therefore probably criminal – cases."

Date: 2010-02-20 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1915