The UK has just passed a far-reaching "Digital Economy" bill that gets the judiciary into the website-blocking business and orders ISPs to pass on copyright notices from media companies. It also makes it easy to expand into throttling and Internet disconnections a year from now.
The moves are explicitly done to help the UK's music and movie industries. This "help the rightsholders!" thinking has taken such hold in the government that an "IP address" can now be defined as an "Intellectual Property (IP) address" rather than an "Internet Protocol address" in official government correspondence—and no one bats an eye.
A reader from the UK wrote us with the unintentionally hilarious details. After the reader sent a letter of concern to his own MP, the letter was forwarded to the Department for Business, Innovation, & Skills, which backed the Digital Economy bill. The Department replied with a letter of its own, describing how rightsholders can find suspected infringers.
Rightsholders can "seek to download a copy of that material and in doing so capture information about the source," said the government letter, "including the Intellectual Property (IP) address along with a date and time stamp."
Sure, it's just a funny mistake on a single letter. But given the context of the entire debate, it looks like an unintentionally revealing peek into the government's collective mind on this issue. What's the main use for the basic plumbing of the Internet? Why, hunting down copyright infringers, of course!
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