At the DEAct conference in London today Rachel Clark, Deputy Director, Communications and Content Industries Dept for Business Innovation and Skills, told us that the deadline for Ofcom to complete its work on the Code of Practice has been put back 3 months to the end of March 2011.

She considered that this was still a difficult deadline to meet but at least it is an admission of the fact that Ofcom has been struggling with the enormity of the task in hand.

Interestingly the meeting comprised around 70 – 80% Rights Holders representatives. I thought this seemed disproportinate but actually only 6 ISPs are seriously being affected in the initial phase. More concerningly is the fact that no Consumer representatives were in the room!!

I will write more about this meeting but in her concluding remarks RC volunteered that Rights Holders had suggested that it might not be worthwhile to pursue this whole DEAct excercise because “the costs they would be incurring would outweight the benefits” .  She considered that if this were the case then the whole DEAct “isn’t worth doing”.

This was in the context of trying to keep the costs of the whole excercise to a minimum. We don’t yet know what the costs are going to be, partly because we don’t know how many letters of notification are going to be issued and partly because the full detail of what comes in scope is not yet known.

Just to finish off for now – I hadn’t realised that DEAct was the biggest trending phrase worldwide on twitter for a week in the run up to the completion of the Act.