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.
2 replies on “Ofcom to get another 3 months to finish #DEAct Code of Practice”
This delay was already revealed when the government announced the results of that cost consultation a couple of weeks ago. No surprise that Rights Holders are complaining though. Still, they did say it would be super-mega-cheap to do so.. 🙂 .
Re consumer reps: they were not invited, possibly did not know about it…. not sure if the “British Video Association” made an effort in getting a balanced audience. It is not only ISPs who are affected, it is also public intermediaries and wifi providers. And businesses which provide internet access to their staff and customers.
The BVA says:
Who should attend?
Private practice TMT and IP lawyers; in-house lawyers; IP/licensing managers; technical administrators and those responsible for policy are likely to benefit most from the event.
http://www.conferencesandtraining.com/digital-economy-act
Read copyright owners and their agents