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UK Culture Secretary: ISPs and Search Engines Need To Act On Piracy

Posted by: , 00:12 AEST, Sun September 18, 2011
Tags: Copyright

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The UK's Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, delivers controversial speech at the Royal Television Festival, in which he calls for shortcuts to be made to due process, for ISPs and search engines to block websites suspected of offering pirated content, and for payment providers to cease providing services to these websites

The UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has called on ISPs and search engines to do more to combat online piracy, and has also labelled piracy "a direct assault on the freedoms and rights of creators of content to be rewarded fairly".

Hunt also expressed the need to "streamline" the legal process, which is just another way to remove or reduce due process, to allow more copyright cases to be processed without full legal recourse and tying up the courts as a result.

And not only does Hunt want website offering pirated content to be blocked or filtered by ISPs and search engines, the Conservative MP also wants website that "promote unlawful distribution of content" to be blocked as well.

Hunt also called on advertisers and payment providers to act more promptly to cut off services offered to websites allegedly engaged in infringing activities.

Critics are incensed at Hunt's suggested actions on the online piracy problem. The executive director of the Open Rights Group, Jim Killock, feels the legal system has the most to lose from Hunt's suggested courses of action. "Jeremy Hunt is pushing new knee-jerk measures to pressurise private bodies into making decisions about who is breaking the law. That amounts to privatisation of justice, which is very dangerous," Killock responded.


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