Digital Economy Bill - Please boycott!

[Thundershot]

Like me dad always says:

"Who ever wins, it wont change a thing for me...I'll still have to go to work in the morning"

[Sundance]

well, that's not really true when the Tories want to axe minimum wage and f*ck with the taxes that Labour introduced or reduced and slash NHS funding.

[ODB]

Err the Tories have said that NHS spending is safe if they are elected (although the whole NHS could do with a massive shake up and the money spent well rather than thrown around as it currently is). The minimum wage doesn't do more than just act as an inflationary measure so is not good from that point of view and any reform of the current tax laws and taxes we have is all good as Labour have given us one of the most complicated and indirect tax systems in the world.

As for Mandelson, he should be thrown out of politics and into prison as he is a corrupt, inept and horribly arrogant man that has repeatedly shown that he cannot be trusted with any form of power. The fact that he has weaseled his way back into this government is a sign of how desperate Brown currently is.

[Thundershot]

well, that's not really true

You're right, thinking about it, my fathers' been retired for 9 years now.. so he doesn't have to go to work in the morning

[Ross SC]

Brown is a c*nt (excuse my french!) & makes blair look like a saint.

[Monkfish]

The problem with us British is we let pricks like Mandelson get away with sh*t like this and his previous offences. In other countries he and half the other sleazy MPs would be locked up by now.

Nah, happens the world over; sleazy politicians are a global pandemic.

A likely side effect of this legislation will be even more pisspoor customer service from ISPs. Already bogged down they'll also have to deal with countless extra customer complaints due to warning letters being fired off incorrectly. We already know from bandwidth throttling that ISPs cannot correctly distinguish between legal and non-legal file sharing - try downloading the perfectly legal LaTex application using a torrent (it's 1GB so how else?) and watch your bandwidth shrink.

Add to that that the ISPs simply don't want to police the system in the first place and I think there'll be a long series of challenges against this law (possibly invoking the ECHR and proportionality issues) to the point where it becomes significantly amended or ignored.

Using current road traffic law as a template I'd expect to see a new, minor offence of "Failure to provide details of an illegal network user" created for the numerous situations where the customer was not the actual filesharer, with an accompanying 20 quid fine or similar. Not good, but not as bad as disconnection.