Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

Rights holders big and small, from the Church of Scientology to Uri Geller, who tried to use takedown notices to make YouTube remove a video that showed the trickery behind his “psychic” stunts, have successfully silenced their critics. So small is the value of each individual customer that it doesn’t justify even their first call to a lawyer.

So big rights holders have signed up sloppy hired guns to send takedown notices to universities who host MP3 recordings of faculty lectures (because the faculty member shares a name with a pop musician). They hire them to accuse a mother of infringement for uploading a short clip of her toddler dancing in the kitchen because a few seconds of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy can be heard in the background.

Fifteen years of draconian copyright regimes show that when you create powerful enforcement tools without any consequence for misuse, they get misused. And half a century’s worth of evidence on digital technology shows that no amount of enforcement will make computers and the internet worse at copying. Hard drives won’t get magically bulkier and more expensive. Networks won’t get less accessible, slower and harder to use. General technological literacy won’t decline. If you want copying to stop, physics is not on your side.

The takedown policy hasn’t reversed physics, so now we have new proposals. Viacom, the media company, has accused YouTube of facilitating infringement by allowing users to flag their videos as private, visible only to friends and families (and invisible to Viacom’s enforcement tools). Under Viacom’s theory, I shouldn’t be allowed to upload videos of my one-year-old for my parents — and only my parents — to see. My rights take a back seat to Viacom’s power to bulk-mail threatening letters to possible infringers.

Even more radical is the Mandelson proposal to disconnect entire families from the internet if a single member — or a neighbour who uses their internet connection — is accused, without proof, of violating copyright. Leave aside the fundamental injustice of collective punishment, a practice so abhorrent that it is outlawed in the Geneva Convention; think instead of the utter disproportionality of this.

The internet is an integral part of our children’s education; it’s critical to our employment; it’s how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It’s how we engage with government. It’s the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. It isn’t just a conduit for getting a few naughty free movies, it is the circulatory system of the information age.

To understand just how disproportionate this is, consider the corollary: what if Peter Mandelson proposed a rule to terminate the internet access of any movie studio or record company accused of three baseless copyright claims against the public? We could go down to all Universal offices and data centres with a huge pair of boltcutters and snip its net wires at the junction box.

It would be a corporate death penalty. Families that receive this penalty — without a judge or trial — will face a similar terminal fate, cut off from the system that connects them to life and livelihood.

The net is full of artists thriving on copies. My latest novel, Makers, came out this week from HarperVoyager, and is also available as a free, freely copyable download (as was my last book, Little Brother, which also sold well). Musicians such as Madonna are moving from record labels (who lose money on uncontrolled copying) to concert promoters (who make more money when copies drive up the price of tickets). It is not the job of government to guarantee that the business model enabled by last year’s technology will go on for ever. If it were, we would have outlawed radio to save vaudeville.

Proposing to terminate your access to the information society because you share living quarters with an accused copyright infringer is madness. The entertainment industry has mistaken the net for an apocalyptically uncontrolled entertainment medium. It wants to take charge of it so that it can be made into a medium more hospitable to its interests.

Cory Doctorow is a novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog (boingboing.net). He will debate “Rethinking Privacy in an Age of Disclosure and Sharing” on Saturday October 31 at 1.30pm at the Battle of Ideas, a weekend of debate on the big issues facing society,at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU. He is also a judge on the debate on copyright at 5.15 the same afternoon.

For more information see www.battleofideas.org.uk or call 020-7269 9220.

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