BiPartition

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Carphone’s Out-of-the-box Solution to Combat Piracy

News in the past few weeks has been focussing mostly on the numerous suggestions to tackle the problem of online piracy. A news item that particularly caught the attention of the public recently was a conference in which 100 British musicians came together to discuss and find the best way to combat illegal downloading of music. The artistes finally came to a consensus that controlling the speed of broadband can be the most effective deterrent.

However, more recently, the chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, Charles Dunstone, has come up with what can be called a radical solution for avoiding piracy at its source. Though the solution is inventive, it has a rather eccentric approach.

According to Dunstone, broadband customers must choose age ratings for their internet connections, akin to what is used by the movie industry. Carphone intends to implement this method of rating through its broadband network TalkTalk, and its implication from the subscribers’ point of view is that it will enable parents to decide the content that their children can see, giving them the prerogative of choosing between a U, 14 or 18 certificate or unclassified.

Households going with the 14 or U options would be able to block access to gambling, pornography and file-sharing sites on every computer in the household. As per the suggestion, parents would be able to prevent their children from accessing sites that may lead to termination of their broadband connection.

Dunstone believes that this strategy would reduce access to file-sharing sites considerably and also help the content industry to blacklist sites that have the file-sharing technology BitTorrent on them.

For information on your ISP and corresponding broadband speed, try using the broadband check from Broadband Genie to get a snapshot of your current download and upload speeds. It’s a good site to compare broadband deals from the top internet service providers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 5:18 am and is filed under Hall Of Net Resources, House Of Music, Telecommunication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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