Section 8 of the Digital Economy Act requires Ofcom to report on the provision of lawful services, education and information campaigns, levels of copyright infringement and legal proceedings against infringers.
By January of 2011 the regulator must have set up an independent monitoring system so that there is data available to measure the success or otherwise of the Act.
Ofcom is proposing that monitoring should consist of three types of input: collation of existing data (eg existing industry reports, ISP traffic data and existing consumer research), consumer research and direct measurement of activity on file sharing networks.
Independant partners will be commissioned for the consumer market research and the direct measurement work with the tendering process beginning in June.
The market research will be conducted 4 times a year on samples of 5,000 persons each time. It will be interesting to see how accurate this research is. Will people tell the truth? I guess it will just be a contribution to the overall dataset.
The baseline data needs to be in place for the start of next year.
