The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has today announced that Ofcom will be asked to review the practicality of the provisions in section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 that might in future allow courts to order blocking of infringing sites.
In our responses to previous consultations on the Act we have expressed concern on two issues:
- that such blocks were unlikely to be effective, and
- that blocking sites that people want to access would promote the adoption of technologies to evade blocks, thereby exposing users and their computers to harmful material that neither they nor their computers wanted to see.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for opportunities to make those comments again in this new review.
